How to scrape SERP Data
3 min readGoogle ranking boosts credibility and users’ trust. This feature has the potential to influence your users’ decisions significantly. Getting positive Google reviews and ratings is one of the promising strategies to ensure a higher ranking.
You’ll need to scrape Google now and then. Although it is not legal, there are no clues that it is. There are various methods for scraping Google. The Google Search Application Programming Interface (API) application allows you to obtain data from its search engine. There are various additional methods for scraping Google.
Read on to learn everything you need about scraping Google and the best ways to scrape Google Search Result Pages.
What is SERP scraping?
Scraping SERP is the process of obtaining the top 10 or more results from a Google search for a set of keywords. The SERPs include not just textual information but also photos, videos, featured snippets, local search maps, and many other elements.
Most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms use this strategy to track their clients’ website ranks for the targeted keywords. Other reasons for performing SERPS scraping include ad verification, lead generating, and content aggregation.
How to scrape Google search results?
#1 Google Search API
Did you know Google has an official way of extracting data from its search engine? Although it has limitations, as discussed below, it is currently available to anyone that needs SERP data. Here are some of its limitations:
- It gives minimal information compared to visual web scrapers, browser extensions, or other web scraping technologies.
- Google developed it intending to search a single or a few websites. You may, however, set it to search the entire World Wide Web (WWW), which needs extensive technical knowledge.
- It is prohibitively expensive since sending many requests would cost a fortune.
As a result of its limits and fees, the Google search API is not an ideal platform for scraping SERP results. It is always preferable to use the alternative approaches discussed throughout this essay.
#2 Using Python, requests, and BeautifulSoup
This strategy would be helpful for those of you who are proficient in Python coding. It would surely lower the initial cost and give you more control. You can extract the SERPs by hardcoding the search phrase to make things easier. Then, after retrieving the result set, you can print the results title.
#3 Using residential proxies to scrape Google SERPs
Search engines such as Google implement restrictions such as prohibiting your IP address if you exceed the scraping limit. Proxies are beneficial here for hiding your IP address. Residential proxies are the best option among all the proxies available.
When you scrape the first few SERPs, Google will discover that your actions are inhumane. It would then ban your proxy’s IP address and force you to enter captchas. This is when the residential proxy network comes in handy. When you employ a network of residential proxies, each one has its own IP address. So you may scrape from SERPs by alternating the IP addresses. The search engine will interpret your actions as human.
Final notes
We hope you now have a good overview of the many strategies employed by web scrapers to scrape data from SERPs. SERPHouse is among the best SERP API providers over most popular search engines. Their integrated Google Search API, Bing Search API & Yahoo Search API scrape data such as organic results, news, images, google my business, and many more.
We hope you found this article informative, and please check back for more.
website URL : https://www.serphouse.com/