Selenium WebDriver VS Scrapy

Selenium is an extensively used open-source automation framework for web applications. It allows for cross-browser testing by automating browser actions, making it a staple tool for end-to-end testing in diverse web development environments.

While similar to Puppeteer, Cypress, and Selenium, there are some differences. Let’s find out what they are.

browser.get('http://selenium.dev/')

Cypress is a next-generation front-end Automation testing tool built for modern web applications. It is a JavaScript-based end-to-end testing framework and is known for faster test execution as compared with other testing tools (like Selenium or Protractor).

Removing ExpectedConditions from documentation makes sense since it was removed from the codebase around 2019 already.

https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium --> trunk

You won't be able to test the javascript function itself from within python, but you can exercise the front-end code using something like cypress (https://cypress.io) or the older but still respectable selenium (https://selenium.dev).

once you solve this you may run into: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/issues/11750, so add that workaround.

Other libraries with similar functionality are Selenium, which is very popular outside the JavaScript world, and Playwright, a younger step-brother of Puppeteer.

🔗 https://selenium.dev

BeautifulSoup4 Scrapy

While there is no specific library for SERP, there are some web scraping libraries that can do the Google Search Page Ranking. One of them which is quite famous is Scrapy - It is a fast high-level web crawling and web scraping framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It offers rich developer community support and has been used by more than 50+ projects.

If you're looking for a turn-key solution, I'd have to dig a little. I generally write a scraper in python that dumps into a database or flat file (depending on number of records I'm hunting).

Scraping is a separate subject, but once you write one you can generally reuse relevant portions for many others. If you can get adept at a scraping framework like Scrapy you can do it fairly quickly, but there aren't many tools that work out of the box for every site you'll encounter.

Once you've written the spider, it's generally able to be rerun for updates unless the site code is dramatically altered. It really comes down to how brittle the spider is coded (i.e. hunting for specific heading sizes or fonts or something) instead of grabbing the underlying JSON/XHR that doesn't usually change frequently.

1. https://scrapy.org

Scrapy capitalizes headers for request

Scrapy is a web scraping toolkit

I know this might not be a good answer, as it's not .NET, but we use https://scrapy.org/ (Python).