Google Search from a Python App

There's a simple example here (peculiarly missing some quotes;-). Most of what you'll see on the web is Python interfaces to the old, discontinued SOAP API -- the example I'm pointing to uses the newer and supported AJAX API, that's definitely the one you want!-)

Edit: here's a more complete Python 2.6 example with all the needed quotes &c;-)...:

#!/usr/bin/python
import json
import urllib

def showsome(searchfor):
  query = urllib.urlencode({'q': searchfor})
  url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&%s' % query
  search_response = urllib.urlopen(url)
  search_results = search_response.read()
  results = json.loads(search_results)
  data = results['responseData']
  print 'Total results: %s' % data['cursor']['estimatedResultCount']
  hits = data['results']
  print 'Top %d hits:' % len(hits)
  for h in hits: print ' ', h['url']
  print 'For more results, see %s' % data['cursor']['moreResultsUrl']

showsome('ermanno olmi')

Here is Alex's answer ported to Python3

#!/usr/bin/python3
import json
import urllib.request, urllib.parse

def showsome(searchfor):
  query = urllib.parse.urlencode({'q': searchfor})
  url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&%s' % query
  search_response = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
  search_results = search_response.read().decode("utf8")
  results = json.loads(search_results)
  data = results['responseData']
  print('Total results: %s' % data['cursor']['estimatedResultCount'])
  hits = data['results']
  print('Top %d hits:' % len(hits))
  for h in hits: print(' ', h['url'])
  print('For more results, see %s' % data['cursor']['moreResultsUrl'])

showsome('ermanno olmi')