There is still a free API, but here is a screen-scraper:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Get Google Count.')
parser.add_argument('word', help='word to count')
args = parser.parse_args()
r = requests.get('http://www.google.com/search',
params={'q':'"'+args.word+'"',
"tbs":"li:1"}
)
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text)
print soup.find('div',{'id':'resultStats'}).text
Results:
$ python g.py jones
About 223,000,000 results
$ python g.py smith
About 325,000,000 results
$ python g.py 'smith and jones'
About 54,200,000 results
$ python g.py 'alias smith and jones'
About 181,000 results
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