beautiful soup extract a href from google search

Question

A google search gives me the following first result on HTML:

<h3 class="r"><a href="https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0470284889" rel="nofollow noreferrer" class="l vst" onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','1','AFQjCNEv1W9YC2jcSKYdEo2kNqBMJ-Utmg','k89K9hF4cVNpxQYHtEKiUQ','0CCoQFjAA',null,event)"><em>Quantitative Trading</em>: <em>How to Build Your Own Algorithmic</em> <b>...</b> - Amazon</a></h3>

I would like to extract the link http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build-Algorithmic-Business/dp/0470284889 from this, but when I use beautiful soup to extract the information, I obtain

soup.find("h3").find("a").get("href")

I obtain the following string instead:

/url?q=http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build-Algorithmic-Business/dp/0470284889&sa=U&ei=P2ycT6OoNuasiAL2ncV5&ved=0CBIQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNEo_ujANAKnjheWDRlBKnJ1BGeA7A

I know that the link is in there and I could parse it by deleting the /url?q= and everything after the & symbol, but I was wondering if there was a cleaner solution.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use a combination of urlparse.urlparse and urlparse.parse_qs, e.g

>>> import urlparse
>>> url = '/url?q=http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build-Algorithmic-Business/dp/0470284889&sa=U&ei=P2ycT6OoNuasiAL2ncV5&ved=0CBIQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNEo_ujANAKnjheWDRlBKnJ1BGe'
>>> data = urlparse.parse_qs(
...     urlparse.urlparse(url).query
... )
>>> data
{'ei': ['P2ycT6OoNuasiAL2ncV5'],
 'q': ['http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build-Algorithmic-Business/dp/0470284889'],
 'sa': ['U'],
 'usg': ['AFQjCNEo_ujANAKnjheWDRlBKnJ1BGe'],
 'ved': ['0CBIQFjAA']}
>>> data['q'][0]
'http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build-Algorithmic-Business/dp/0470284889'

Answer 2

To extract only the first result from the page you can use select_one() by passing a CSS selectors or find() bs4 methods.

Code and example in the online IDE:

import requests, lxml
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

headers = {
    "User-Agent":
    "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/72.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 Edge/18.19582"
}

# passing parameters in URLs
# https://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/quickstart/#passing-parameters-in-urls
params = {'q': 'Quantitative Trading How to Build Your Own Algorithmic - amazon'}

def bs4_get_first_googlesearch():
    html = requests.get('https://www.google.com/search', headers=headers, params=params).text
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')

    first_link = soup.select_one('.yuRUbf').a['href']
    print(first_link)

bs4_get_first_googlesearch()

# output:
'''
https://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build-Algorithmic-Business/dp/0470284889
'''

---

Alternatively, you can do the same thing using Google Search Engine Results API from SerpApi. It's a paid API with a free trial of 5,000 searches. Check out the playground.

The big difference is that everything is already done for the end-user: selecting elements, bypass blocking, proxy rotation, and more.

Code to integrate:

from serpapi import GoogleSearch
import os

def serpapi_get_first_googlesearch():
    params = {
      "api_key": os.getenv("API_KEY"),
      "engine": "google",
      "q": "Quantitative Trading How to Build Your Own Algorithmic - amazon",
      "hl": "en",
    }

    search = GoogleSearch(params)
    results = search.get_dict()
    # [0] - first element from the search results
    first_link = results['organic_results'][0]['link']
    print(first_link)

serpapi_get_first_googlesearch()

# output:
'''
https://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build-Algorithmic-Business/dp/0470284889
'''

Disclaimer, I work for SerpApi.