Why are Google API queries through simplejson returning "responseData": null?

Question

I'm trying to screenscrape the first result of a Google search using Python and simplejson, but I can't access the search results the way that many examples online demonstrate. Here's a snippet:

url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&%s' % (query)
search_results = urllib.urlopen(url)
json = simplejson.load(search_results)
try:
    results = json['responseData']['results'] # always fails at this line
    first_result = results[0]
except:
    print "attempt to set results failed"

When I go to http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&stackoverflow (or anything else substituted for the %s) in a browser, it displays the line "{"responseData": null, "responseDetails": "clip sweeping", "responseStatus": 204}." Is there some other way to access the results of a Google search in Python besides trying to use the apparently empty responseData?

Answer 1

You missed the &q=. You also should consider using an api-key. http://code.google.com/intl/de/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/. Besides that plain string contaction wont work, you need to escape the parameter.

 url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q= ' + urllib.quote_plus(query)