Web Scraping - A Guide to its Legality and Myths!

Today, web extraction has become an essential part of businesses. With this comes several myths and legalities leading to doubts and debates. As such, learn about these myths and more through the guide.

February 5, 2020

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Scraping Google Search results is important for many companies. Google is by far the largest web scraper in the world but when you try to scrape their web pages, it just does not allow the same. It is tough to perform search engine scraping and equally a huge hassle for many to get anything out of the results.

Google utilizes several methods to detect automated access

When accessing Google for scraping, you can be warned about some “dangerous” activity. One can see a warning about a virus or a Trojan on the screen.
If you continue scraping the search engine, they will issue the first block with the virus message. One would need a Captcha with an authentication cookie to continue the process.
For the third instance, Google would resort to larger weapons, blocking the IP temporarily. The block could range from some minutes to a number of hours, and this means one should end the current scraping process and change the code/add IPs.
If you continue web scraping Google search results, you are bound to be banned for a long time!

How does Google detect the scraping process?

Google mainly detects the scraping process through the IP address, the identification sign of the users who are scraping the search results, along with keyword changes that are searched for in a short period of time. The process is also detected with the help of frequency of allowed access patterns to Google.
Related article: Why scraping Google is a real tough job to undertake? How to deal with it?

Search Engine Scraping and avoiding detection during the process

One needs a reliable proxy source for IP-Address changes on a consistent basis. They need to be anonymous, fast, and with no history of abuse against Google. Any proxy solution is fine for use with quality IPs that has been unused for Google access.
Use between 50 – 150 proxies depending on results brought out for each search query and continued scraping activity. Some projects could require more than 150 proxies too. Never continue scraping if the process is detected by Google.
Clear Cookies after changing the IP address or disable the IPs completely.
Set the search results to the maximum number of 100 with the command &num=100 right on the search URL itself.
Do not use threads even if multiple web scraping methods on Google are running. One can scrape millions of search results on a daily basis without using threads.
Append several keywords to your main search that do not yank out more than a thousand results while fetching all URLs.
Change your IP address consistently at the right point in time of the scraping process. The timing is crucial to your scraping success!
One can easily get 300-1000 results for each keyword then it is time to rotate the IP especially after each keyword is changed.
In case of less than 300 results, scrape some keywords with one IP but add a bit of a pause and delay in the process with the sleep() function or you might have to increase the number of proxies being used.
If you receive a prominent virus/Captcha warning, then leave the process at the point of time. The scraping process detection releases the Captcha.
Use another source of IPs if more than 100 proxies are used.
With proper planning, one can scrape Google 24/ 7 without being detected.
Avoid graylisting by not scraping more than 500 requests in a single day per IP address.
The scraping process could be a lot slower than a web crawler, but it’s safe, and quick to do the process manually.

You can even perform web scraping on Google Maps to find local demographic data or for your campaigns. Get help from professional Google scraping services offered by reputed companies since they churn out results within a few minutes while handling millions of tracked keywords on a daily basis.