The Fliquid Studios site has posted their introduction to using the Google Search API via a cURL interface in PHP.

A lot of people these days use 3rd party sites or services to gain SEO data about their site or service. A lot of these people simply do not realize just how simple it is to build some tools to gain statistics from the big search engines. In this post I plan to give you a very basic introduction on how to go about getting some search engine statistics from Google using their API.

They show how to create the connection (including the URL to search on) and a form that can be used to submit the terms back to the script. A demo and downloadable code are included.