Google Search Web Scraping with Python

Here is another service that can be used for scraping SERPs (https://zenserp.com) It does not require a client and is cheaper.

Here is a python code sample:

import requests

headers = {
    'apikey': '',
}

params = (
    ('q', 'Pied Piper'),
    ('location', 'United States'),
    ('search_engine', 'google.com'),
    ('language', 'English'),
)

response = requests.get('https://app.zenserp.com/api/search', headers=headers, params=params)

You have 2 options. Building it yourself or using a SERP API.

A SERP API will return the Google search results as a formatted JSON response.

I would recommend a SERP API as it is easier to use, and you don't have to worry about getting blocked by Google.

1. SERP API

I have good experience with the scraperbox serp api.

You can use the following code to call the API. Make sure to replace YOUR_API_TOKEN with your scraperbox API token.

import urllib.parse
import urllib.request
import ssl
import json
ssl._create_default_https_context = ssl._create_unverified_context

# Urlencode the query string
q = urllib.parse.quote_plus("Where can I get the best coffee")

# Create the query URL.
query = "https://api.scraperbox.com/google"
query += "?token=%s" % "YOUR_API_TOKEN"
query += "&q=%s" % q
query += "&proxy_location=gb"

# Call the API.
request = urllib.request.Request(query)

raw_response = urllib.request.urlopen(request).read()
raw_json = raw_response.decode("utf-8")
response = json.loads(raw_json)

# Print the first result title
print(response["organic_results"][0]["title"])

2. Build your own Python scraper

I recently wrote an in-depth blog post on how to scrape search results with Python.

Here is a quick summary.

First you should get the HTML contents of the Google search result page.

import urllib.request

url = 'https://google.com/search?q=Where+can+I+get+the+best+coffee'

# Perform the request
request = urllib.request.Request(url)

# Set a normal User Agent header, otherwise Google will block the request.
request.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.88 Safari/537.36')
raw_response = urllib.request.urlopen(request).read()

# Read the repsonse as a utf-8 string
html = raw_response.decode("utf-8")

Then you can use BeautifulSoup to extract the search results. For example, the following code will get all titles.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# The code to get the html contents here.

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

# Find all the search result divs
divs = soup.select("#search div.g")
for div in divs:
    # Search for a h3 tag
    results = div.select("h3")

    # Check if we have found a result
    if (len(results) >= 1):

        # Print the title
        h3 = results[0]
        print(h3.get_text())

You can extend this code to also extract the search result urls and descriptions.

You can also use a third party service like Serp API - I wrote and run this tool - that is a paid Google search engine results API. It solves the issues of being blocked, and you don't have to rent proxies and do the result parsing yourself.

It's easy to integrate with Python:

from lib.google_search_results import GoogleSearchResults

params = {
    "q" : "Coffee",
    "location" : "Austin, Texas, United States",
    "hl" : "en",
    "gl" : "us",
    "google_domain" : "google.com",
    "api_key" : "demo",
}

query = GoogleSearchResults(params)
dictionary_results = query.get_dictionary()

GitHub: https://github.com/serpapi/google-search-results-python

You can always directly scrape Google results. To do this, you can use the URL https://google.com/search?q=<Query> this will return the top 10 search results.

Then you can use lxml for example to parse the page. Depending on what you use, you can either query the resulting node tree via a CSS-Selector (.r a) or using a XPath-Selector (//h3[@class="r"]/a)

In some cases the resulting URL will redirect to Google. Usually it contains a query-parameter qwhich will contain the actual request URL.

Example code using lxml and requests:

from urllib.parse import urlencode, urlparse, parse_qs

from lxml.html import fromstring
from requests import get

raw = get("https://www.google.com/search?q=StackOverflow").text
page = fromstring(raw)

for result in page.cssselect(".r a"):
    url = result.get("href")
    if url.startswith("/url?"):
        url = parse_qs(urlparse(url).query)['q']
    print(url[0])

A note on google banning your IP: In my experience, google only bans if you start spamming google with search requests. It will respond with a 503 if Google thinks you are bot.