Function takes a string as parameter and returns the approximate number of Google search results containing that string

google_counts.R

require(RCurl)
require(XML)

google.counts<-function(s){
    search.url<-paste("http://www.google.com/search?q=",gsub(" ","+",s),sep="")
    search.html<-getURL(search.url)
    parse.search<-htmlTreeParse(search.html,useInternalNodes = TRUE)
    search.nodes<-getNodeSet(parse.search,"//div[@id='resultStats']")
    search.value<-strsplit(xmlValue(search.nodes[[1]])," ",fixed=TRUE)[[1]][2]
    return(as.numeric(gsub(",","",search.value,fixed=TRUE)))
}