My colleague Brian, of New Internationalist Australia mentioned a tool he uses to get keyword suggestions for adwords and SEO purposes. So, I thought I'd have a crack at making a perl version. This is that. Its called The Suggester. Cunning name, huh?

The Suggester grabs a bunch of keywords related to a search term from Google suggest. It's loosely based on a python script that I saw but can't find in my history now and an older perl implementation, John Bokma's gsuggest.pl. The suggester takes the approach of appending each letter of an alphabet to your search term and searching for suggestions for that. If your term was "foo" it would search for "foo a", "foo b" and so on up to "foo z". The suggestions that google returns are deduplicated and presented in alphabetical order. Like this:

$ the_suggester.pl term
The Suggester

Note: results are alphabetically sorted and unique

=============================================
 Num queries | Term
=============================================
       87800 | 'literary term quiz'
     2540000 | 'medical term qd'
    26700000 | 'term a pest'
   514000000 | 'term address'
    34300000 | 'term african american'
     4530000 | 'term and permanent life insurance'
    10400000 | 'term and whole life insurance'
     6620000 | 'term appointment'
    52700000 | 'term arab spring'
    36900000 | 'term assistant professor'
      289000 | 'term auction facility'
       29100 | 'term auction facility wiki'
     7650000 | 'term b loan'
   201000000 | 'term baby'
   276000000 | 'term bill'
     2420000 | 'term bill rutgers'
   225000000 | 'term birth'
     2850000 | 'term black irish'
     5250000 | 'term bond'
      361000 | 'term breech trial'
     3410000 | 'term busters'
    14700000 | 'term by term differentiation'
    90100000 | 'term calculator'
    19500000 | 'term certain'
   153000000 | 'term cloud'
…