Show Search Result Count in Homepage outside of WordPress

Hello community:
I have a short question regarding showing information from WordPress outside of the WordPress installation: For a project at the company I work, I need a Script that shows up the search result count of a wordpress blog, outside of it. What I mean is a separate website, that is used as a metasearch engine (searches in different blogs), I have to show the search result number from a wordpress blog. There are different approaches that I have in mind. I could maybe use Tip Nr. 8 from this Smashing Magazine Article:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/10/10-useful-wordpress-loop-hacks/

which means creating my own WordPress Loop using The WP_Query Object in a File at the root folder and then inlude this php file in the separate website? or as a second approach I could try and modify this script from the wordpress forum:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/226572?replies=15

so that it pulls, not the the number of posts in the WP database but the search results count. Only I don’t know how to achieve it.

Of course the query:

<?php
// ...Call the database connection settings
require( path to /wp-config.php );

// ...Connect to WP database
$dbc = mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD);
if ( !$dbc ) {
    die( 'Not Connected: ' . mysql_error());
}
// Select the database
$db = mysql_select_db(DB_NAME);
if (!$db) {
    echo "There is no database: " . $db;
}

// ...Formulate the query
$query = "
    SELECT *
    FROM <code>wp_posts</code>
    WHERE <code>post_status</code> = 'publish'
    AND <code>post_password</code> = ''
    AND <code>post_type</code> = 'post'
    ";

// ...Perform the query
$result = mysql_query( $query );

// ...Check results of the query and terminate the script if invalid results
if ( !$result ) {
    $message = '<p>Invalid query.</p>' . "\n";
    $message .= '<p>Whole query: ' . $query ."</p> \n";
	die ( $message );
}

// Init a variable for the number of rows of results
$num_rows = mysql_num_rows( $result );

// Print the number of posts
echo "$num_rows Posts";

// Free the resources associated with the result set
if ( $result ) {
    mysql_free_result( $result );
    mysql_close();
}
?>

hast to be different, but I′m really not a php master. Thank you very much for your support! Thanks a lot!

Wow. It’s a lot simpler than that to count WordPress’ search results, here:

<?php
    global $wp_query;
    $count = sizeof( $wp_query->posts );
    echo"<pre>";
    //var_dump($wp_query);// The WP Query Object
    var_dump($wp_query->posts); // The WP Query Object's 'posts' property (note the plural)
    echo"</pre>";
?>

If you drop that snippet in your search template, it will output the properties of the ‘$wp_query’ variable, specifically the ‘posts’ property of the object. This is an array that stores a collection of the returned posts from the search query, which you can do a number of things with once you access it, including (*drumroll*), *count* the number of posts in that array using either PHP’s ‘count()’ or ‘sizeof()’ function.