PowerShell Examples: Using Bing to measure the popularity of cmdlets in a specific PowerShell module

This blog is part of a series that shows example PowerShell code for those learning the language.

This time we’re using PowerShell to find out which PowerShell cmdlet in a specific module is the most popular. To do this, we’re using a Bing search and producing a list with the name and number of web pages found for each one. This is returned as an object, so you can pipe the output to sort or filter. The name of the module is hard coded to “SmbShare”, but you can replace it with any valid module name. You could also make a parameter.

This example explores using the Internet Explorer objects, searching through web pages by ID, showing cmdlet progress and also a trick to create an object on the fly. It also shows more common items like arrays, string manipulation and functions.

#
# Popularity (via Bing) of the PowerShell cmdlets in a module
#

#
# Function to see how many pages Bing finds for a given term
#

# Adds assembly to support URL encoding
Add-Type -Assembly System.Web

Function Get-BingCount([string] $Term) {

    # Add plus and quotes, encodes for URL
    $Term = [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($Term)
    $Term = "+" + "`"" + $Term + "`""

# Navigate to the Bing page to query the $term
$ie.Navigate("http://bing.com/search?q="+$term);

    # Wait for the page to load
    $timeout = 0
    while ($ie.Busy) {
        # Write-Host "Waiting for Bing page for $term to load"
        Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 100
        $timeout++
        If ($timeout -gt 100) {
            return "L-Error"
        }
    }

    # Wait for the document to be ready
    $timeout = 0
    $element1 = $ie.Document.IHTMLDocument3_getElementById("b_tween").innertext
    $element2 = $ie.Document.IHTMLDocument3_getElementById("b_content").innertext
    While ($element1 -eq $null -and $element2 -eq $null) {
        # Write-Host "Waiting for Bing document for $term to be ready"
        Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 100
        $timeout++
        If ($timeout -gt 100) {
            return "D-Error"
        }
        $element1 = $ie.Document.IHTMLDocument3_getElementById("b_tween").innertext
        $element2 = $ie.Document.IHTMLDocument3_getElementById("b_content").innertext
    }

    # Get the count of pages
    If ($element1 -ne $null) { $result = $element1.split(" ")[0] }
                       else { $result = "0" }
    # Return the count
    return $result
}

#
# Main code
#

# Create Internet Explorer object
$ie = New-Object -ComObject "InternetExplorer.Application"

$CmdletList = Get-Command -Module SmbShare | Select Name
$CmdletCount = $CmdletList.Count -1

0..$CmdletCount | % {

# Tracks progress
Write-Progress -Activity "Checking cmdlet popularity" -PercentComplete ($_ * 100 / $CmdletCount)

    # Check the popularity with Bing
    $cmdlet = $CmdletList[$_].Name
    $count = [string] (Get-BingCount $cmdlet)
    $countint = [int] $count
    # Format as a row, output it
    $Row = "" | Select CmdletName, BingCount
    $Row.CmdletName = $cmdlet
    $Row.BingCount = $countint
    $Row
}

Write-Progress -Activity "Checking cmdlet popularity" -Completed

# Quit Internet Explorer
$ie.quit();

In case you were wondering what the output would look like, here is a sample: