blekko 0.1

bindings for the Blekko search engine API

This module provides simple bindings to the Blekko API. To use the API, contact Blekko for an API key.

This module currently only supports search queries and page statistics. The API also provides tools for manipulating slashtags, but this library doesn’t support that yet.

The library is internally rate-limited to one query per second in accordance with Blekko’s guidelines.

Searching

To use the API, first create a Blekko object using your “source” or “auth” API key:

import blekko
api = blekko.Blekko(source='my_api_key')

Then, to perform searches, use the query method. Its arguments are the search terms (as a string) and, optionally, the page number:

results = api.query('peach cobbler')

The returned object is a sequence containing Result objects, which themselves have a number of useful fields:

for result in results:
    print result.url_title
    print result.url
    print result.snippet

Errors in communicating with the server are raised as BlekkoError exceptions, so you’ll want to handle these exceptions when making calls to the API.

An Example

Putting it all together, here’s a short script that gets a single link for search terms on the command line:

import blekko
import sys

_api = blekko.Blekko(source='my_api_key')

def get_link(terms):
    try:
        res = _api.query(terms + ' /ps=1')
    except blekko.BlekkoError as exc:
        print >>sys.stderr, str(exc)
        return None
    if len(res):
        return res[0].url

if __name__ == '__main__':
    link = get_link(' '.join(sys.argv[1:]))
    if link:
        print(link)
    else:
        sys.exit(1)

Page Statistics

Blekko provides an API for getting SEO-related statistics for a URL. Use the pagestats method, which takes a URL as its only parameter, to get a dictionary containing information about a page:

>>> api.pagestats('http://python.org/')
{u'cached': True, u'ip': u'82.94.164.162', u'host_rank': 3835.107267,
u'host_inlinks': 467267, u'adsense': None, u'dup': True,
u'rss': u'http://www.python.org/channews.rdf'}

Credits

These bindings were written by Adrian Sampson and modeled after the Perl bindings by Greg Lindahl. The source is made available under the MIT license.