In this post, we will learn to scrape Google organic search results using Node JS.
Requirements
Before we start, we will install these packages, which we will use further in the tutorial:
Articles
Scraping websites built for modern browsers is far more challenging than it was a decade ago. jsoup is a convenient API that makes scraping websites trivial via DOM traversal, CSS Selectors, JQuery-Like methods, and more. But it isn’t without its caveat. Every scraping API is a ticking time bomb.
Real-world HTML is flaky. It changes without notice since it isn’t a documented API. When our Java program fails in scraping, we’re suddenly stuck with a ticking time bomb. In some cases, this is a simple issue that we can reproduce locally and deploy. But some nuanced changes in the DOM tree might be harder to observe in a local test case. In those cases, we need to understand the problem in the parse tree before pushing an update. Otherwise, we might have a broken product in production.
The popularity of web scraping is growing at such an accelerated pace these days. Nowadays, not everyone has technical knowledge of web scraping and they use APIs like news API to fetch news, blog APIs to fetch blog-related data, etc.
As web scraping is growing, it would be almost impossible not to get cross answers when the big question arises: is it legal?
