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Search Google for Business URLs

Source: R/search_url.R
searchURL.Rd

Sends search queries to the Google Custom Search API to identify URLs associated with businesses. The function processes queries provided in a data frame and returns link results together with positional information.

Usage

searchURL(cfg, dat, file = file, query_col = query_col)

Arguments

cfg

A cfg_googlesearch() configuration object containing API credentials and query-related settings.

dat

A data.frame or data.table containing variables from which search queries were constructed.

file

Optional CSV filename to which results will be written. If the file exists and overwrite = FALSE is set in cfg, previously saved results will be loaded and skipped.

query_col

Character scalar; the name of the column in dat that contains encoded search queries created via buildQuery().

Value

A data.table containing the following columns:

  • idcol – Identifier for the business

  • attributes – Fields extracted from Google results (e.g., link, title)

  • position – Search result ranking position

Details

To use this function, you must provide a valid Google Custom Search API key via the environment variable SCRAPING_APIKEY_GOOGLE, for example by adding it to your ~/.Renviron file. In addition, the Custom Search Engine (CSE) identifier must be available via the environment variable SCRAPING_ENGINE_GOOGLE.

Examples

## Example usage will be added in future versions