Python SERP Scraping Tutorial: Step-By-Step in 2023

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2 min read

What is a SERP Scraper ?

SERP Scraper API is a tool that gathers real-time parsed and ready-to-use search engine data from both organic and paid results. Organic, popular products, paid videos, product listing ads, images, featured snippets, related searches, and many other public data sources can be extracted.

To monitor brand mentions or product counterfeiting, you can extract data for any search query from the search page, keyword pages, and other page types.

Building a web scraper: Python prepwork

Throughout this entire web scraping tutorial, Python 3.4+ version will be used. Specifically, we used 3.8.3 but any 3.4+ version should work just fine.

For Windows installations, when installing Python make sure to check “PATH installation”. PATH installation adds executables to the default Windows Command Prompt executable search.

Windows will then recognize commands like “pip” or “python” without requiring users to point it to the directory of the executable (e.g. C:/tools/python/…/python.exe). If you have already installed Python but did not mark the checkbox, just rerun the installation and select modify. On the second screen select “Add to environment variables”.

Getting to the libraries

One of the Python advantages is a large selection of libraries for web scraping. These web scraping libraries are part of thousands of Python projects in existence – on PyPI alone, there are over 300,000 projects today. Notably, there are several types of Python web scraping libraries from which you can choose:

  • Requests

  • Beautiful Soup

  • lxml

  • Selenium

Requests library

Web scraping starts with sending HTTP requests, such as POST or GET, to a website’s server, which returns a response containing the needed data. However, standard Python HTTP libraries are difficult to use and, for effectiveness, require bulky lines of code, further compounding an already problematic issue.

Unlike other HTTP libraries, the Requests library simplifies the process of making such requests by reducing the lines of code, in effect making the code easier to understand and debug without impacting its effectiveness. The library can be installed from within the terminal using the pip command:

... to be continued.