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Google SERP proxy

Learn how to collect search results from Google Search-powered tools. Get search results from localized domains in multiple countries, e.g. the US and Germany.


Google SERP proxy allows you to extract search results from Google Search-powered services. It allows searching in various countries and to dynamically switch between country domains.

Our Google SERP proxy currently supports the below services.

  • Google Search (http://www.google.<country domain>/search).
  • Google Shopping (http://www.google.<country domain>/shopping/product/<product ID>).
  • Google Shopping Search (http://www.google.<country domain>/search?tbm=shop).

Google SERP proxy can only be used for Google Search and Shopping. It cannot be used to access other websites.

When using the proxy, pricing is based on the number of requests made.

Connecting to Google SERP proxy

Requests made through the proxy are automatically routed through a proxy server from the selected country and pure HTML code of the search result page is returned.

Important: Only HTTP requests are allowed, and the Google hostname needs to start with the www. prefix.

For code examples on how to connect to Google SERP proxies, see the examples section.

Username parameters

The username field enables you to pass various parameters, such as groups and country, for your proxy connection.

When using Google SERP proxy, the username should always be:

groups-GOOGLE_SERP

Unlike datacenter or residential proxies, there is no session parameter.

If you use the country parameter, the Google proxy location is used if you access a website whose hostname (stripped of www.) starts with google.

Country selection

You must use the correct Google domain to get results for your desired country code.

For example:

  • Search results from the USA: http://www.google.com/search?q=<query>

  • Shopping results from Great Britain: http://www.google.co.uk/seach?tbm=shop&q=<query>

See a full list of available domain names for specific countries. When using them, remember to prepend the domain name with the www. prefix.

Examples

Using the Apify SDK

If you are developing your own Apify Actor using the Apify SDK and Crawlee, the most efficient way to use Google SERP proxy is CheerioCrawler. This is because Google SERP proxy only returns a page's HTML. Alternatively, you can use the got-scraping NPM package by specifying the proxy URL in the options. For Python, you can leverage the requests library along with the Apify SDK.

The following examples get a list of search results for the keyword wikipedia from the USA (google.com).

import { Actor } from 'apify';
import { CheerioCrawler } from 'crawlee';

await Actor.init();

const proxyConfiguration = await Actor.createProxyConfiguration({
groups: ['GOOGLE_SERP'],
});

const crawler = new CheerioCrawler({
proxyConfiguration,
async requestHandler({ body }) {
// ...
console.log(body);
},
});

await crawler.run(['http://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia']);

await Actor.exit();

Using standard libraries and languages

You can find your proxy password on the Proxy page of Apify Console.

The username field is not your Apify username.
Instead, you specify proxy settings (e.g. groups-GOOGLE_SERP).
Use groups-GOOGLE_SERP to use proxies from all available countries.

For examples using PHP, you need to have the cURL extension enabled in your PHP installation. See installation instructions for more information.

Examples in Python 2 use the six library. Run pip install six to enable it.

The following examples get the HTML of search results for the keyword wikipedia from the USA (google.com).

Select this option by setting the username parameter to groups-GOOGLE_SERP. Add the item you want to search to the query parameter.

import axios from 'axios';

const proxy = {
protocol: 'http',
host: 'proxy.apify.com',
port: 8000,
// Replace <YOUR_PROXY_PASSWORD> below with your password
// found at https://console.apify.com/proxy
auth: { username: 'groups-GOOGLE_SERP', password: '<YOUR_PROXY_PASSWORD>' },
};

const url = 'http://www.google.com/search';
const params = { q: 'wikipedia' };

const { data } = await axios.get(url, { proxy, params });

console.log(data);