Ah, nice, and that URI (after first redirecting) suggests they are using the Web Search API that used to exist,and is still around but rate-limited:

> Note: The Google Web Search API has been officially deprecated as of November 1, 2010. It will continue to work as per our deprecation policy, but the number of requests you may make per day will be limited. Therefore, we encourage you to move to the new Custom Search API.

The Custom Search API is not free, and I think doesn't let you search all of Google either, but only 'custom search engines' set up with certain hosts.

All sorts of interesting things you could do with google if they gave you an api.