No other search engine or website holds more information than Google. So if you want to collect and extract data from the web, there’s a good chance you’re planning to scrape it from Google.
But how do you build a Google scraper that gives you what you want, without getting caught? And are there any differences when scraping Google Search, Google Shopping, or Google Images data?
It’s a world of possibilities, but there are also limitations. The obvious one being when your bot gets blocked, but there are more hurdles than just that. You know that great Google reverse image search feature they have?
Well, they discontinued their Google Reverse Image Search API a while back, which means scraping like that isn’t exactly easy. And that’s just one example.
If you’re planning on building a Google scraper you need to know where to start, and what options are available to you. And that’s where this short guide comes in. So let’s have a look at
Why build a Google scraper?
With over 63,000 searches per second – all day every day – there’s no place for data like Google. And if you run a business, there’s a good chance Google is the best site to gather information about your customers and competitors.
Maybe you want to contact local businesses in a certain area to offer them your product or services. Instead of manually searching for all this information why not scrape Google Maps for local business information like names, phone numbers, and addresses so you can easily gain those leads?
Or maybe you’re an SEO expert, hoping to boost your company’s site performance. You can harvest data from Google to monitor the performance of your main competitors in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Or how about checking your own rankings to ramp up your SEO efforts and help your site climb to the top?
The list of possible applications is endless!
Building a Google scraper
There are many ways to go about scraping data from Google, and building a Google scraper is one of them.
This is a good option if you have the technical knowledge (i.e. you know how to write code). If not, you might want to go with an alternative method. More on that further below.
When building your own Google scraper, the most common and easiest way is by using the Python programming language, with the modules Requests and BeautifulSoup. It’s best not to use Selenium for scraping purposes as it is quite easy to detect and it enables Google to create a unique fingerprint of you.
It’s essential to further ensure that you use quality proxies so your IP address won’t be blocked straight away. Google does not allow the automated sending of queries, and they have multiple levels of defense in place to stop web scrapers from extracting any data from the SERPs.
For example, they will test the User-Agent, enforce request-rate limitations, or blacklist IP addresses that have been classified as showing bot-like behavior.
There are different types of proxies available, but when trying to scrape Google the best ones are residential proxies. Another important step is to ensure you’re rotating proxies, for which you can use several external proxy providers or web scraping APIs.
Aside from the use of the right programming language, modules, and proxies, there are still many more steps to take into consideration. For example, you need to make sure you randomize and delay the time between separate requests to avoid easy detection of unhuman behavior. Another important point is to set the correct headers.
Finally, bear in mind that building a Google scraper is only half the work. Once you’ve built it, you need to constantly adapt and expand your code to help you further scale and grow your scraping efforts, whilst keeping up with Google’s constantly changing defense mechanisms.
Google scraper alternatives
Maybe you’re not that technical, or maybe you just don’t have that much time on your hands to whip up a Google scraper yourself. If so, you can make your life a whole lot easier by choosing a Google scraper tool.
There are many different Google scrapers available in both free and paid versions. Some of these tools still require a little bit of coding on your part, while others offer visual dashboards where you don’t have to write a single word of code.
A great example of a readily available Google scraper for small businesses is SERPMaster. It has plenty of dedicated scraping APIs that can get you data from anything – Images, News, Shopping, Scholar, etc. Although it does lack a nice GUI which might be an issue if you lack any integration experience whatsoever.
And there you have it. A very short overview of how to build a Google scraper from scratch or with the help of web scraper tools.
Whichever way you choose, there is a wealth of data just waiting to be scraped. Ready to get your hands on it? Good luck!
By Amanda Baron