For most of us, Google is only a search engine using which we quench our curiosity for numerous questions. Hardly any of us extend the utilization of Google beyond its function as a search engine. It has been plentiful years of Google’s existence, and in these many years, it has gradually evolved to become a powerhouse of digitalization. Google gets all its might through its data, and many wonder how to extract the same. It is undoubtedly a tricky affair, but once you are done scraping, it’s all worth it. The scraping can be performed by implementing Google Search API, without coding, and with Python. This article will cover how you can scrape Google’s search results with the help of Python.
What is the Need for Google Search Scraping?
Before moving with the steps of how to scrape with the help of Python, let us understand why a SERP API is used. To begin with, web scraping is the simple art of automatically collecting data. Automation plays the real game here, googling ‘proxies’ and manually penning down top results cannot be completely considered web scraping. Contrariwise, utilizing specialized software like crawlers or scrapers for conducting this activity that will include dozens of keywords at a time does lead to web scraping. All in all, Google search scraping describes any automated accumulation of descriptions, URLs, and similar relevant data.
If you are concerned about observing your website’s ranking on Google, examining your competitor’s performance, or scrutinizing the paid ads on Google, web scraping is the ideal activity you need to indulge in.
How to Utilize Python for Finding Google Search Results
Google search results API can be perfectly accessed with the help of Python. It doesn’t matter if you are not an expert, even if you are a newbie in technicalities and possess some sort of programming experience, you can do it. You need to be at ease with coding and then can start using Python with the Beautiful Soup Library for scraping the web results. Before beginning with the steps, you need to perform certain basic things. First, install the Python language on your computer or laptop. In case you are experiencing any issues while installing, there are numerous tutorials to check out regarding the same.
Post installation of Python, there are two additional installations of modules, namely bs4, and requests. Bs4 (Beautiful Soup). Beautiful Soup is a Python library that is utilized for reading XML and HTML data from the web. This proposal is a module that enables the delivery of HTTP requests to the website. You can install both modules with the following command on your end or command prompt.
a) pip install bs4: A thing to note about Beautiful Soup or bs4 is, it doesn’t come all attached with python. For installation, this command is required to be put in.
b) pip install requests: Through requests, you will be permitted to deliver HTTP/1.1 requests conveniently. You will not find this module attached to Python, this command is necessary to get it installed.
Post installation of the bs4 and requests module, the following can be utilized for scraping the results.
“#Bring in the beautifulsoup and request libraries of python.
import requests
import bs4
#Generate two strings with the default google search URL
# ‘https://google.com/search?q=’and
#our customized search keyword.
#Concatenate them
text= “web scraping”
url = ‘https://google.com/search?q=’ + text
#Bring the URL data using requests.get (url),
#gather it in a variable, request_result.
request_result=requests.get (url)
#Generating soup from the picked-up request
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup (request_result.text, “html.parser”)
#soup.find.all (h3) to grab
# all major headings of our search result,
heading_object=soup.find_all (‘h3’)
#Repeat through the object
#and print it as a string.
for info in heading_object:
print (info.getText())
print (“——-”)”
After completing this, you can choose to alter the values of the text variable in the previous code of your preferred search keyword. This can be explained through this example, change text = ‘web scraping’ to text=’octoparse’.
Following this, run the python script for receiving the outcome of every result in the search result.
Apart from python, there are additional scraping methods like API, browser extensions, visual web scrapers, data collection services, and so on. You can choose to select any one of your choices. Apart from the search APIs, there are Google Maps API, Google Trends API, Google Cloud Vision, Geocoding, and more. There are certain API providers who offer a huge collection of all of these. Always look for a provider who will thoroughly guide you through every process. All in all, using python for seeking google search results can be considered one of the ideal ways, and the aforementioned steps will hopefully be of good help.
