TL;DR
- What it is + data types: Search, News, Images, Scholar, Jobs.
- Use cases: SEO / ads, lead gen (Maps), brand protection.
- Legal: scraping public data is generally okay; blockers include IP bans, CAPTCHAs, layout changes, and rate limits.
- How: no-code for small; at scale use a scraping API (Scrapingdog has Google / Bing; 1,000 free credits).
Every decision today is backed up by data, & therefore the value of data cannot be understated.
Unless you are informed in advance, you can’t make a wise decision for your business.
And what’s the best way to get the data?
Scraping the search engines!!
A recent research study revealed that the search engine giant Google contains over 100,000,000 GB worth of data.
That’s an enormous amount of data! In this read, we will look into what search engine scraping is, the legal side of it, and the challenges it brings.
If you are looking to scrape Google or other search engines for that matter, we would also guide you through the best way to do it.
Let’s jump in!
What is Search Engine Scraping?
In layman’s terms, web scraping is the process of extracting data from a particular source, however when we scrape or extract data from search engines then the process is referred to as search engine scraping.
This data extracted can be analyzed and used for various purposes. Now to extract this data, you can go the old-fashioned way of manually extracting it.
However, extracting large volumes of data manually is not possible, and or error-prone unless you are a super human!!🤪
We will discuss the ways & tools to harvest this data later in this read, however, first let’s see what type of data you can extract from search engines.
Data Types You Can Extract from Search Engines
Search engines offer a wealth of information in various formats. There are separate sections made for each, as you would often see on a Google search page.
Recently, Google has introduced AI overviews & AI mode, and the data can be extracted from these two tabs as well as from search, News, Images, Scholar, Jobs, etc.
So, scraping search engine results isn’t the only route you could take. Rather, you can expand your research by extracting data from other types, too.
Next, we will discuss where you can use this data!
Use cases of Search Engine Scraping
Training LLM Models
Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on trillions of words collected from the web. A big part of this comes from search-engine–accessible content news articles, blogs, forums, research papers, and more. By scraping search engine results at scale, researchers can build massive, diverse datasets that fuel model training.
SEO And Digital Marketing
SEO is one of the mainstream channels for most of the businesses. According to a study conducted, it generates 34% of the qualified leads for B2B businesses.
By extracting data from SERPs, businesses can analyze which competitor websites rank higher for keywords and understand the factors contributing to their success.
This information is crucial for developing effective SEO strategies, including keyword optimization, content creation/optimization, and link building.
Additionally, digital marketers can use this data to craft more targeted and effective advertising campaigns, understanding what content resonates with audiences and how to position their brand effectively in the domain.
If you are a marketer, Scrapingdog’s Google Sheets add-on allows you to get data from search results easily. You don’t need to know any programming language or no-code tools. Simply install the add-on in your Spreadsheet, signup with Scrapingdog (to get the API_KEY) & scrape the results.
You can read the documentation of the Google Search API to understand how all parameters work.
This video helps you understand how this add-on works, and if you are into SEO, it can be a handy tool.
Google scraping can be used to track rankings on search results. We recently built a rank tracker using Google Sheets that you can use for yourself. The advantage of using these customized rank trackers is that you save a lot of money when compared to using built-in tools for this specific purpose.
Lead Generation and Sales Intelligence
Search engines can play a significant role in generating leads. Scraping Google Maps of your target potential customers can give you the phone numbers. Similarly, there are other Google products you can web scrape to generate leads.
Again, for this specific use case, we built an automation using Make & Google Maps to extract local leads. Here is the video for the same: –
Well, how about if you want to generate leads without using any external tools like Appollo or Zoominfo? Well, Google has public data available that it indexes from different platforms.
In this blog, we extracted leads of fashion influencers from Google search. We extracted the data that is already there with Google using site operators.
Learn More: Web Scraping for Lead Generation
Brand Protection
Building a brand from the ground up is a considerable achievement, and naturally, protecting its reputation is of utter importance. Today threats to your brand’s image require serious attention and proactive measures.
Many companies utilize search engine scraping to detect instances of brand misuse or imitation. This technique is particularly effective in identifying unauthorized use of proprietary business elements, such as images or videos, by competitors or other entities.
We recently built a workflow with Scrapingdog’s Google News API, and general scraper API & n8n. You can refer to the video here: –
Is scraping search engines legal?
Yes, the data offered is enormous, however, is it legal to scrape these search engines?
In general, extracting data from any platform is legal as long as you are extracting publicly available data.
You would be surprised to know that Google itself does web scraping to collect data and index it.
So how it can be illegal if Google itself is doing it?
Different platforms have set different laws against scraping. For example, we recently wrote an article on whether scraping LinkedIn is Legal or not.
A general rule of thumb again is that if it is the data is available to everyone, it is scrapable!!
But Google doesn’t want you to get its data very easily. Therefore it imposes some challenges, which we have discussed in our next section
Challenges of Search Engine Scraping
A key issue lies in search engines’ difficulty differentiating between beneficial and harmful bots.
As a result, legitimate web scraping activities are frequently misidentified as malicious, leading to unavoidable obstructions.
IP Blocks
One major obstacle is the risk of IP blocking. Search engines can easily detect a user’s IP address.
During web scraping, a large number of requests are sent to servers to retrieve needed information.
If these requests consistently originate from the same IP address, search engines may block it, perceiving it as non-human traffic. This necessitates careful planning to avoid IP-related issues.
CAPTCHAs
CAPTCHAs represent another prevalent security measure. Search engines throw CAPTCHAs when their system detects unusual or bot activity.
Standard tools struggle to bypass CAPTCHAs, often leading to IP blocks & stopping your data pipeline.
Dealing with Unstructured Data
Successfully extracting data from search engines is just the right start. However, the real challenge lies in handling the fetched data, especially if it is unstructured and difficult to interpret.
Therefore, it’s crucial to consider the desired data format before choosing the right search engine scraping tool.
The utility of the scraped data hinges on its readability and structure, making this an important factor in your scraping strategy.
Frequent Changes in SERP Layouts and Algorithms
Search engines frequently update their algorithms and change the layout of their result pages. These updates can significantly impact scraping efforts, as existing scripts or tools become unusable overnight.
Keeping up with these changes requires constant monitoring and quick adaptation of scraping tools and techniques.
Businesses must invest in agile and adaptable scraping solutions capable of quickly responding to these changes to maintain uninterrupted data collection.
Rate Limiting and Throttling
Another challenge in scraping is rate limiting and throttling implemented by search engines. These mechanisms limit the number of requests an IP address can make within a certain timeframe. Exceeding these limits can result in temporary blocks or slowed responses from the server.
Effective scraping requires a strategy that either rotates IP addresses or schedules requests in a manner that respects these rate limits, thereby avoiding throttling and ensuring continuous data access.
Read More: Web Scraping Challenges You Need To Know
Tools to Scrape Search Engines
There are a couple of ways to extract search results. The very basic way would be to do it manually, however, this method is time-consuming, is prone to make mistakes, and is not scalable, as I told you at the beginning of this article.
Further, there are no-code readily available tools, these tools can be used by someone who has zero experience in scraping. These tools have some limitations, that can be overcome by using a Web scraping API.
Although some programming background needs to be there to run APIs, they are a great way to scale the process of scraping search results. For scraping Google search results, Scrapingdog provides a Google Search Result Scraper API, the output you get is in JSON format. To test it, we have kept the 1000 credits free.
Also, you can use the Scrapingdog’s Google Sheets Add-on, which I mentioned earlier in this read, a handy tool for marketers.
Similar to Google Search API, we have a dedicated API for scraping Bing Search Results, which you can use if you are looking to extract data from this search engine.
Conclusion
Search engines are indeed a great source of information. The value they can provide is immense.
Tools built for this specific purpose can scale up the process for you.
Scrapingdog provides you with dedicated APIs for scraping specific platforms & we do have dedicated APIs for scraping Google Maps, Google Lens & Scholar.
We also provide web scraping as a service too, you can contact us at [email protected] with your specific needs
Happy Scraping!!
Additional Resources
- Scrape Bing Search Results using Python
- How to Scrape Google AI Mode Using Python
- 6 Best Rank Tracking APIs
- Scrape Google Search Results using Python
- Scrape Google Autocomplete Suggestions using Node.js
- Scrape Google Jobs using Nodejs
- Web Scraping Google Patents using Python
- Scraping Yahoo Search Engine Results using R
- Scrape Google Shopping Results using Python
- Scrape Google Images using Python
