Data scraping on web pages has become quite popular lately. With the developing technology, developers and businesses can regularly obtain data from the web pages they want. However, although the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) data of search engines provide many benefits, especially to businesses, it is very difficult to dig. Google scraping is a grueling task, especially for developers. But there are many ways developers can scrape Google SERP data without any blocking, such as using a Google scraping API.
There are many ways to scrape Google search engine result page data nowadays. But of these ways, especially using a Google scraping API or developing a web scraping tool, are two that stand out. In this article, we will tell you about these two ways and what you can do to prevent blocking while scraping the Google search engine. But first, we’ll explain why businesses need Google SERP data.
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Why Scraping Google Search Results is Important for Businesses?
Scraping Google search results can provide many important benefits to businesses today. By scraping Google search results, businesses can gain benefits such as:
- Competitive Advantage: Scraping Google search results allows businesses to analyze their competitors’ websites, products and services, pricing policies, and marketing strategies. This information enables businesses to gain a competitive advantage.
- Market Research: By scraping search results, businesses can gain valuable insights about their target markets. For example, they can optimize their marketing strategy by analyzing popular keywords, user search trends, consumer preferences, search frequency, and comments for a particular product or service.
- Customer Feedback: By scraping Google search results, businesses can easily get customer feedback. By analyzing their customers’ comments, reviews, and ratings on products and services, businesses can take steps to improve the customer experience.
- Brand Monitoring: By scraping search results, businesses can track their brand’s online reputation. They can monitor customer reviews, social media posts, press releases, and other online content. Thus, businesses can understand how their brands are perceived and intervene when necessary.
Best Ways to Scrape Google Without Getting Blocked
It is not an easy process for developers to be able to scrape Google search results. In order for them to perform these operations, they need to make some changes to their application’s codes. In this section, we will list the best practices that developers should apply when scraping Google search results.
Using Proxy
The most effective way to reduce the risk of getting blocked while scraping Google is to use a proxy. A proxy server provides anonymity and privacy by hiding the user’s real IP address and forwarding web requests through another server. Today, Datacenter and Residential proxies are mainly used in web scraping processes.
Rotating IP Addresses
Proxy services usually have a pool of IP addresses. When configuring your proxies, be sure to consider rotating your requests across different IP addresses. This makes it difficult for Google to track your scraping activities. This way, you can make requests using different IP addresses instead of constantly sending requests from the same IP address.
Setting Real User Agents
It is also very important to set up real user agents to avoid blocking in web scraping operations. The user agent is the information that the web browser uses to identify itself to the web server. Using browser user agents in web scraping shows the web server that you are a real browser. Browsers’ user agent values are usually found under the “User-Agent” heading. For example, a user agent such as “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.82 Safari/537.36” can be used for the Chrome browser.
Implementing CAPTCHA Solvers
It is very important to use CAPTCHA solvers to avoid blocking while scraping search results on Google. CAPTCHA is a security measure used on websites and is designed to block automatic scraping. CAPTCHA solvers are used to automatically pass CAPTCHA tests.
Setting Intervals to Requests
Adding certain intervals to the scraping frequency of the application we have developed for Google scraping will prevent blocking by Google. With regular scraping at very short intervals, Google notices this traffic and blocks the web scraping application. To avoid this, scraping operations can be performed by specifying 2-second intervals.
Using a Google Scraping API
Using a good Google scraping API is the best practice to avoid blocking in web scraping. This API usually contains all the items we listed above. So developers using this API can easily scrape Google without any additional tuning. Today, especially Zenserp API, Serper API, Scrapingdog API, and DataForSEO API are frequently used by developers and businesses.
Learn all tips to scrape Google search results!
Right API for Google Scraping: Zenserp API
Zenserp API is the best anti-blocking web scraping API by Google today. This API also supports Google, Yandex, Bing, and DuckDuckGo search engines.
Zenserp API is a web scraping API that can easily scrape all Google products, such as Google Images, Google Videos, Google News, Google Trends, and more. Thanks to its powerful infrastructure, this API prevents its users from being noticed and blocked by target websites. It works in real-time and provides the JSON format response it provides to its users very quickly. It also provides location-based web scraping to its users.
This API has a high-scalable structure. In this way, users can easily use this API for their high-traffic transactions. Finally, developers can easily integrate the Zenserp API into any programming language. It is a simple-to-use API and the documentation it provides contains sample integration codes for many programming languages.
How to Scrape API with Zenserp API
In this section, we will easily obtain Google search results with the Python programming language using the Zenserp API. For this, let’s sign up for one of the subscription plans offered by Zenserp API and get an API key.
Let’s open a Python file named ‘google-scraping-with-zenserp-api’ in the file path where we will develop the application. Then put the following codes in this file.
| import requests headers = { “apikey”: “YOUR-ACCESS-KEY”} params = ( (“q”,“Pied Piper”), (“location”,“New York,New York,United States”), ); response = requests.get(‘https://app.zenserp.com/api/v2/search’, headers=headers, params=params); print(response.text) |
This code snippet will print the search results of the keyword ‘Pied Piper’ for the New York location to the console of the application. Before running this application, let’s put our own API key in the ‘YOUR-ACCESS-KEY’ field and run the application with the following command.
| python google-scraping-with-zenserp-api.py |
Some part of the JSON response printed on the console screen after running this application is as follows.
As seen in this section, we scraped Google search results without any blocking in just a few steps. Without any proxy configuration.
Conclusion
In summary, scraping Google data is essential for businesses and developers today. But scraping Google data is no easy task. It is important for developers to follow steps such as proxy usage and proxy rotation so that they can scrape Google without any blocking. It is also possible for developers to scrape Google search results without any configuration using a Google SERP scraping API.
FAQs
Q: What is a Google Scraping API?
A: The Google scraping API provides developers with an interface to scrape data from Google’s search results and other services. This API provides access to Google’s search results and features programmatically. The Google scraping API makes it possible to automatically retrieve Google search results, create custom search queries, filter or sort search results, index websites and perform other customized data scraping.
Q: What are Common SERP APIs in the Market?
A: Recently, there are many SERP APIs on the market that developers and businesses can use. The most popular of them are:
- Zenserp API
- Serper API
- Scale SERP API
- Scrapindog API
- DataForSEO API
Q: What are the Ways to Scrape Google Without Getting Blocked?
A: There are some steps developers can follow to scrape Google search results avoiding getting blocked by the Google search engine. Some of these steps are as follows:
- Using Proxy
- Rotating IP Addresses
- Setting Real User Agents
- Implementing CAPTCHA Solvers
- Setting Intervals to Requests
- Using a SERP Scraping API like Zenserp
Q: What Search Engines Does the Zenserp API Support?
A: The Zenserp API supports today’s most popular search engines. These:
- Yandex
- DuckDuckGo
- Bing
Zenserp API can also scrape SERP results from YouTube. There is no need to sign up for an additional plan for this.
Q: How Many API Calls Is Zenserp API’s Free Subscription Plan Limited?
A: With the free plan provided by the Zenserp API, it offers users up to 50 requests per month. To access the free plan, there is no need to provide any credit card information during the sign-up process.
