Pulling backlinks from Google

When you search Google for the number of links pointing to a website, it has the following string on the page:

I want to extract that 431 into a variable in PHP, but I'm having trouble figuring out the code to do it. So far I have this:

function checkGoogleBacklinks($url) {
// takes in $url as a domain (i.e. example.com) and returns the number of Google backlinks

$google_url = "http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=link%3A+$url&btnG=Google+Search&meta=";
$google_results = file_get_contents($google_url);

// extract stuff

  return($backlinks);
}

Code (markup):

The above code will take a url and load the page from Google, but I don't know how to pull the backlinks number out of the html code.


I know it's going to take some sort of preg_match or something like but, but how do I do it?

Thanks

 

You need to use regex to extract that "Results 1 - 10 of about*" link then assign it a variable then open that url you grabbed.

 

Any chance you know the coding for it? I really suck at regex

 

I found the code that works, here it is if anybody wants it for their projects (note - this isn't my code, I found it on http://www.roscripts.com/Display_Google_backlinks_with_PHP-79.html):

function google_backs($url){ 
    $site = fopen('http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3A'.urlencode($url),'r'); 
    while($cont = fread($site,1024657)){ 
        $total .= $cont; 
    } 
    fclose($site); 
    $match_expression = '/of about <b>(.*)<\/b> linking to/Us'; 
    preg_match($match_expression,$total,$matches); 
    return $matches[1]; 
}

Code (markup):