In this recent post to the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc points out a recent announcement from Google that the GDELT database information is now available via their BigQuery functionality.

The Global Database of Events, Language and Tone is one of the largest datasets on the planet. It is the quantitative database of human society, relying on thousands of news sources from every corner of the globe dating back to 1979. [...] Google BigQuery, “Google’s powerful cloud-based analytical database service” is, basically, the world’s fastest SQL engine, and it’s completely free for any and all uses of GDELT. Due to the sheer power of BigQuery, you can get results on GDELT queries in near real-time and any permutation of fields and values you can think of won’t be enough to bog it down to a halt – unless you really mess things up and go against the grain.

He goes on to describe the GDELT database and what kind of information it contains. He also includes an example query and the kind of data it returns (screenshot). He also links to a PHP-based library that you can install via Composer and use API keys to access their search endpoints.