Take a look at the example of Alex Martelli .
If you are looking for something vague, like โcars,โ it datawill look something like this: Note that it is not very long; you get only the best hits and a link to "moreResultsUrl". Therefore, for this request should be fast enough and look in data['cursor']['estimatedResultCount']for an estimated number of hits.
{'cursor': {'currentPageIndex': 0,
'estimatedResultCount': '168000000',
'moreResultsUrl': 'http://www.google.com/search?oe=utf8&ie=utf8&source=uds&start=0&hl=en&q=cars',
'pages': [{'label': 1, 'start': '0'},
{'label': 2, 'start': '4'},
{'label': 3, 'start': '8'},
{'label': 4, 'start': '12'},
{'label': 5, 'start': '16'},
{'label': 6, 'start': '20'},
{'label': 7, 'start': '24'},
{'label': 8, 'start': '28'}]},
'results': [ <<list of 4 dicts>> ]}