function get_number($url){
      $fp = @fopen("$url", "r");
      if($fp){
        while($in = fread($fp, 1024))
          $reply .= $in;
        fclose($fp);
        if(ereg("of about <strong>(.*)</strong> for", $reply, $reg))
        return str_replace(",","",$reg[1]);  
        else
          return "ERR: No result!";
      }
      return "Error : Could not connect to website!";
    }

this is from openbusiness.cc statistics code.

yahoo and google get result number from HTML

html, google

PHP