Google Keyword Tool and search engine APIs

[Kassey Lee]

I'm interested in the following information.

1. For a root word, get a list of related keywords and their monthly search volumes as returned by Google Keyword Tool
2. For each keyword, find out the number of websites as returned by Google search engine.

Is there any FREE tool to achieve that?

Even better, is there any free APIs that I can use with VBA to dump the results into an Access table?

 

[MitroP]

I believe Traffic Travis (which is free) does this. Though it's been a long time since I've used so I'm not 100% sure. I recommend Market Samurai for that purpose. Though, if your talking about competition research, I think that looking at the number of your competitors is pretty meaningless. Your competition is the top 10 results in Google for that keyword (or Yahoo or Bing, if you want to compete there).

 

[WebIntellects - Rob]

Is there any FREE tool to achieve that?

Yes it is free. But you need to have adwords account first of all.

 

[Kassey Lee]

I spent several hours today to try to find out how to write a program to retrieve Google total search results. Some articles on the Internet say accessing the Google search by program is called scraping and forbidden by Google. (Someone also said 300 to 3000 searches per day is OK, though.) A suggestion is to apply to use Google Search API. Is it free to use? Is there anyone who has experience with this approach?

 

[enlytend]

It's free, up to a certain volume of requests. Look on their site for details.

 

[Kassey Lee]

Just found out Google is no longer issuing license key for SOAP Search API. Now you must use AJAX Search API embedded in a web page on your site (which means not from a program?). I'm back to square one. Also, finding the sign-up page is not easy. I finally found it here:

Sign-up for an AJAX Search API Key - Google AJAX Search API - Google Code

Is scraping the only choice for me?