search

$27

Halt and route to skills/bright-data-best-practices/references/cli-setup.md if either check fails.

Pick your path

Situation

Action

Single keyword query, just SERP

bdata search "<query>" --engine google --json --pretty

Paginated SERP (more results)

loop --page 0, --page 1, … (0-indexed)

Multiple queries

shell loop over a queries file

Intent-ranked / semantic (not keyword)

bdata discover "<query>" --intent "<intent>" --num-results 20

Want page bodies along with results, one pass

bdata discover ... --include-content

News / images / shopping SERP

bdata search "<query>" --type news (or images, shopping)

Want Amazon/LinkedIn/TikTok/… structured data

**stop — hand off to data-feeds**

Have URLs, want content

**hand off to scrape**

Action

Core commands:

# Google SERP, structured JSON

bdata search "site:example.com privacy policy" --engine google --json --pretty

# Localized Bing (German results, German language)

bdata search "datenschutz" --engine bing --country de --language de --json

# Second page of results (0-indexed)

bdata search "machine learning papers" --page 1 --json

# Mobile SERP (rankings differ from desktop)

bdata search "best coffee shops" --device mobile --json

# News vertical

bdata search "openai" --type news --json --pretty

# Intent-ranked discovery

bdata discover "enterprise LLM platforms" \

    --intent "vendor pages with pricing" \

    --num-results 15 --json

# Discovery with page content in markdown

bdata discover "webhook best practices" \

    --include-content --num-results 10 -o results.json

# Date-filtered discovery

bdata discover "react server components" \

    --start-date 2025-01-01 --end-date 2025-12-31 --num-results 20

Full flag reference: references/flags.md.

search vs discover — pick the right one

You want

Use

"What Google ranks for this exact keyword"

search

"Pages that match this meaning/intent"

discover

"News / images / shopping vertical SERP"

search --type <vertical>

"Results + page bodies in one call"

discover --include-content

"Dedup / semantic ranking across queries"

discover

Verification gate

• JSON parses cleanly: jq . <output> returns 0.

• Result array non-empty — if empty, the query is legitimately zero-result; relax the query and re-run. Don't claim success on empty results without telling the user.

• Required fields present:

• search: results live at .organic[]; each has title + link

• discover: results live at .results[]; each has title + link; if --include-content, also content

• **For discover --include-content:** no block-page signatures in the content field (same list as scrape, case-insensitive):

• Access Denied

• Just a moment

• Attention Required

• Checking your browser

• captcha

• cf-browser-verification

• cloudflare (with < 2KB total body)

• Geo sanity: if the user expected country-specific results, inspect TLDs / languages of top results. If mis-localized, re-run with explicit --country and --language.

Red flags

• Using search to fetch content from Amazon, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. when data-feeds returns clean structured data in one call.

• Scraping every SERP result blindly — filter first (domain allowlist, keyword in title, relevance heuristic).

• Confusing search (keyword) with discover (semantic). They answer different questions.

• Running multiple queries without deduping URLs across result sets before scraping.

• Assuming SERP order is universal — it's personalized by geo + device. Always set --country and --device explicitly for reproducibility.

• Using --page as a result count — it's a page index, not a limit. Each page returns ~10 results.

• Assuming SERP results are at .results[] — for bdata search they live at .organic[]. (Discover uses .results[].)

• Hardcoding --num-results 100 on discover without realizing the pipeline polls until that many are found; can be slow.

References

• references/flags.md — full flags for search and discover with when-to-use notes.

• references/patterns.md — multi-query dedup, SERP → filter → scrape pipeline, search vs discover decision, legacy curl fallback, shared verification checklist.

• references/examples.md — (1) single Google query, (2) localized Bing, (3) batch queries + dedup into URL list, (4) discover --include-content end-to-end.