In the previous part of this tutorial, we've created a very simple spider that allows us to crawl Google's normal search results. In this part of the tutorial, we're going further than before.
WARNING: Don't ever use this spider to scrape lots of data. As of Google provides a public API that allows you to call 100 times for free, your IP will be banned if Google noticed the unusual traffic from your computer. This spider is built only for learning purposes, and it shouldn't be used in real projects. So keep that in mind, and we'll get started.
What We Are Crawling
You might not fully understand what I'm talking about this crazy video thing. All right, let me explain it. If you search Google for Python, for example, there will be a card containing videos related to the search as the picture shown below.
The part with a Videos heading is what we're going to crawl. Seems easy, right? Will, it's not gonna be as easy as Part 1's work.
Analyze Time
Okay, so now we know where we're building, let's take a look at the webpage.
If you look for the results, you can see that they're surrounded by a g-scrolling-carousel element.
Inside it, there's another g-inner-card element containing video details for every videos.
All right, so now we've got all the containers, let's take a look at the details. First, we need to have the video title. It's inside a div element with attribute role="heading".
...And the link inside an a element:
Then, we'll look for the video author, which has a style with max-height:1.5800000429153442em;min-height:1.5800000429153442em;font-size:14px;padding:2px 0 0;line-height:1.5800000429153442em:
We've also need to fetch for the video's source, or platform. For example, Youtube. It's inside a span whose parent is a div with style font-size:14px;padding:1px 0 0 0;line-height:1.5800000429153442em.
And we'll also get the video's upload date. It's right below video author's span, inside the same parent element. We'll just strip the video author's text to get its text when we reach the code.
Finally, we are going to look for the video length. It's in the second child element of a div styled with height:118px;width:212px.
Where's the Cover?
You might wonder about the video cover image. Where's that? Well, it's inside the JavaScript. If you take a closer look under the video details, you will find three <script> tags containing Base64 images. Copy one of them and you will probably get the video cover. So now we've got the information, let's see how can we locate them. The easiest way is to locate their parent <div> and find all the script tags. But, there's lots of them! The way I'm using is to locate their sibling element <span id="fld"></span>. With that, we can locate its sibling elements - script tags. The tags we're looking for are the last three script element, excluding the first one. We can just use [1:] in Python to get rid of it.
Alright, Hands On!
Create a function called __search_video and we'll put all of our code inside it.
class GoogleSpider(object):
# ...
def __search_video(self, response: requests.Response) -> list:
"""Search for video results based on the given response
Args:
response (requests.Response): the response requested to Google search
Returns:
list: A list of found video results, usually three if found
"""
pass
And we will create our BeautifulSoup object from the response:
class GoogleSpider(object):
# ...
def __search_video(self, response: requests.Response) -> list:
"""Search for video results based on the given response
Args:
response (requests.Response): the response requested to Google search
Returns:
list: A list of found video results, usually three if found
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
Then, let's locate our g-inner-card:
class GoogleSpider(object):
# ...
def __search_video(self, response: requests.Response) -> list:
# ...
cards = soup.find('g-scrolling-carousel').findAll('g-inner-card')
And loop through them to generate our search result:
class GoogleSpider(object):
# ...
def __search_video(self, response: requests.Response) -> list:
# ...
results = []
# Generate video information
for card in cards:
try: # Just in case
# Title
title = card.find('div', role='heading').text
# Video length
length = card.findAll('div', style='height:118px;width:212px')[
1].findAll('div')[1].text
# Video upload author
author = card.find(
'div', style='max-height:1.5800000429153442em;min-height:1.5800000429153442em;font-size:14px;padding:2px 0 0;line-height:1.5800000429153442em').text
# Video source (Youtube, for example)
source = card.find(
'span', style='font-size:14px;padding:1px 0 0 0;line-height:1.5800000429153442em').text
# Video publish date
date = card.find(
'div', style='font-size:14px;padding:1px 0 0 0;line-height:1.5800000429153442em').text.lstrip(source).lstrip('- ') # Strip the source out because they're in the same container
# Video link
url = card.find('a')['href']
except IndexError:
continue
else:
# Append result
results.append({
'title': title,
'length': length,
'author': author,
'source': source,
'date': date,
'url': url,
'type': 'video'
})
return results
And finally, we'll do the cover part together. First, let's create a variable called covers_ to store the scripts we've found. Note that I used [1:] to create a slice of the list to remove the first tag.
class GoogleSpider(object):
# ...
def __search_video(self, response: requests.Response) -> list:
# ...
# Pre-process the video covers
covers_ = soup.find('span', id='fld').findNextSiblings('script')[1:]
# ...
Then, we will loop through them:
class GoogleSpider(object):
# ...
def __search_video(self, response: requests.Response) -> list:
# ...
# Pre-process the video covers
covers_ = soup.find('span', id='fld').findNextSiblings('script')[1:]
# Get the cover images
covers = []
for c in covers_:
# TODO
# ...
And we will append each base64-coded images to the list covers. Here we need to remove the unnecessary JavaScript code and only keep the image. If you don't know about rsplit which I've used in my code, well, it's a special version of split. It will start from the end to scan for the result and split them. For example, if I have a variable called text:
>>> text = 'Hi everyone! Would you like to say Hi to me?'
If you split it the normal way:
>>> text.split('Hi', 1)
['', ' everyone! Would you like to say Hi to me?']
But with rsplit:
>>> text.rsplit('Hi', 1)
['Hi everyone! Would you like to say ', ' to me?']
The reason I used it here is because there might be another ;var ii inside the base64 image, and if I used split, it would create a broken image.
class GoogleSpider(object):
# ...
def __search_video(self, response: requests.Response) -> list:
# ...
# Pre-process the video covers
covers_ = soup.find('span', id='fld').findNextSiblings('script')[1:]
# Get the cover images
covers = []
for c in covers_:
# Fetch cover image
try:
covers.append(str(c).split('s=\'')[-1].split(
'\';var ii')[0].rsplit('\\', 1)[0])
except IndexError:
pass
# ...
...and add them to our list:
class GoogleSpider(object):
# ...
def __search_video(self, response: requests.Response) -> list:
# ...
for card in cards:
# ...
try: # Just in case
# Video cover image
try: # Just in case that the cover wasn't found in page's JavaScript
cover = covers[cards.index(card)]
except IndexError:
cover = None
except IndexError:
continue
else:
# Append result
results.append({
# ...
'cover': cover,
# ...
})
# ...
OK, so we are almost there. There's one more thing that we need to work on, is that when we search something that doesn't contain a video result, our program will throw an AttributeError. To prevent that, we need to add a try-except:
class GoogleSpider(object):
# ...
def __search_video(self, response: requests.Response) -> list:
# ...
try:
cards = soup.find('g-scrolling-carousel').findAll('g-inner-card')
except AttributeError:
return []
# ...
for card in cards:
try:
# Title
# If the container is not about videos, there won't be a div with
# attrs `role="heading"`. So to catch that, I've added a try-except
# to catch the error and return.
try:
title = card.find('div', role='heading').text
except AttributeError:
return []
# ...
except IndexError:
continue
else:
# ...
return results
I re-structured the structure of the GoogleSpider class, so you might want to do the same thing as I did. I put all of the Part 1's code inside the __search_result method, and re-created the search function. All its doing is to call the private functions and put the results together:
class GoogleSpider(object):
# ...
def search(self, query: str, page: int = 1) -> dict:
"""Search Google
Args:
query (str): The query to search for
page (int): The page number of search result
Returns:
dict: The search results and the total page number
"""
# Get response
response = self.__get_source(
'https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&start=%d' % (quote(query), (page - 1) * 10))
results = []
video = self.__search_video(response)
result = self.__search_result(response)
pages = self.__get_total_page(response)
results.extend(result)
results.extend(video)
return {
'results': results,
'pages': pages
}
# ...
Full Code
The full code of this tutorial until Part 2 is below.
# Import dependencies
from pprint import pprint
from urllib.parse import quote
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
class GoogleSpider(object):
def __init__(self):
"""Crawl Google search results
This class is used to crawl Google's search results using requests and BeautifulSoup.
"""
super().__init__()
self.headers = {
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:79.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/79.0',
'Host': 'www.google.com',
'Referer': 'https://www.google.com/'
}
def __get_source(self, url: str) -> requests.Response:
"""Get the web page's source code
Args:
url (str): The URL to crawl
Returns:
requests.Response: The response from URL
"""
return requests.get(url, headers=self.headers)
def __search_video(self, response: requests.Response) -> list:
"""Search for video results based on the given response
Args:
response (requests.Response): the response requested to Google search
Returns:
list: A list of found video results, usually three if found
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
try:
cards = soup.find('g-scrolling-carousel').findAll('g-inner-card')
except AttributeError:
return []
# Pre-process the video covers
covers_ = soup.find('span', id='fld').findNextSiblings('script')[1:]
# Get the cover images
covers = []
for c in covers_:
# Fetch cover image
try:
covers.append(str(c).split('s=\'')[-1].split(
'\';var ii')[0].rsplit('\\', 1)[0])
except IndexError:
pass
results = []
# Generate video information
for card in cards:
try:
# Title
# If the container is not about videos, there won't be a div with
# attrs `role="heading"`. So to catch that, I've added a try-except
# to catch the error and return.
try:
title = card.find('div', role='heading').text
except AttributeError:
return []
# Video length
length = card.findAll('div', style='height:118px;width:212px')[
1].findAll('div')[1].text
# Video upload author
author = card.find(
'div', style='max-height:1.5800000429153442em;min-height:1.5800000429153442em;font-size:14px;padding:2px 0 0;line-height:1.5800000429153442em').text
# Video source (Youtube, for example)
source = card.find(
'span', style='font-size:14px;padding:1px 0 0 0;line-height:1.5800000429153442em').text
# Video publish date
date = card.find(
'div', style='font-size:14px;padding:1px 0 0 0;line-height:1.5800000429153442em').text.lstrip(source).lstrip('- ') # Strip the source out because they're in the same container
# Video link
url = card.find('a')['href']
# Video cover image
try: # Just in case that the cover wasn't found in page's JavaScript
cover = covers[cards.index(card)]
except IndexError:
cover = None
except IndexError:
continue
else:
# Append result
results.append({
'title': title,
'length': length,
'author': author,
'source': source,
'date': date,
'cover': cover,
'url': url,
'type': 'video'
})
return results
def __get_total_page(self, response: requests.Response) -> int:
"""Get the current total pages
Args:
response (requests.Response): the response requested to Google using requests
Returns:
int: the total page number (might be changing when increasing / decreasing the current page number)
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
pages_ = soup.find('div', id='foot', role='navigation').findAll('td')
maxn = 0
for p in pages_:
try:
if int(p.text) > maxn:
maxn = int(p.text)
except:
pass
return maxn
def __search_result(self, response: requests.Response) -> list:
"""Search for normal search results based on the given response
Args:
response (requests.Response): The response requested to Google
Returns:
list: A list of results
"""
# Initialize BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
# Get the result containers
result_containers = soup.findAll('div', class_='rc')
# Final results list
results = []
# Loop through every container
for container in result_containers:
# Result title
title = container.find('h3').text
# Result URL
url = container.find('a')['href']
# Result description
des = container.find('span', class_='st').text
results.append({
'title': title,
'url': url,
'des': des,
'type': 'result'
})
return results
def search(self, query: str, page: int = 1) -> dict:
"""Search Google
Args:
query (str): The query to search for
page (int): The page number of search result
Returns:
dict: The search results and the total page number
"""
# Get response
response = self.__get_source(
'https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&start=%d' % (quote(query), (page - 1) * 10))
results = []
video = self.__search_video(response)
result = self.__search_result(response)
pages = self.__get_total_page(response)
results.extend(result)
results.extend(video)
return {
'results': results,
'pages': pages
}
if __name__ == '__main__':
pprint(GoogleSpider().search(input('Search for what? ')))
Summing Up
So now we can crawl Google's related video results, but you might be asking: Why can it only crawl 3 video results? Well, that's because in Google's source code, there's only three. If you found a way of scraping more, please leave a comment and I'll add it to the post as soon as I can. Of course, if you have any questions or having an error when coding, leave a comment below and I'll be happy to help.
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