Bing keeps its position as one of the leading search engines in the market. Bing search results can be a source of useful information for SEO, marketing, HR, and other spheres of work. In this article, we will discuss how to use a scraper to collect data from Bing.
How Does Bing Fight Against SERP Parsing?
Basically, Bing won’t try to block or restrict your access as long as your scraping follows the current terms of use. Some of the data or information that you scrape can be protected by the laws of certain countries, so you should check these parameters before startin your project.
In most cases, you need to be careful when working with any confidential data or intellectual property on the site side. However, even if you face any kind of restriction from a targeted website or Bing, datacenter proxies can help you get around them. With proxy setup, you can change your IP address to a new one, so Bing won’t be able to prevent you from web scraping. In other words, you save yourself and avoid being detected by websites and Bing.
In this article, we are talking about SERPs parsing, and search engines do not require any authentication from you. So, you can scrape data from a site and parse this information as long as it is available to the public. This way, you can scrape not only the search results but also organic results, related queries, and other information from the search page. You can use static residential proxies in any of these use cases for the best choice of locations from the rich IP addresses pool.
Why Scrape Bing Search Results?
Nowadays, Google unconditionally maintains its leadership as the most popular search engine. But even with such a competitor, more than 1 billion people use Bing as the main Internet search tool. So, even with a smaller user base, Bing can be a good source for SERP scraping. Keep in mind that modern scraping or parsing activities almost always require you to use proxies. You can look at the residential proxies option and choose the needed location for your servers in almost any country in the world.
Plus, in 2023, Microsoft added AI functions to the Bing search. This way, you can get unique results for your scraping that you won’t be able to pull from any other browser. This makes Bing the second-most popular option for SERP parsing among other search engines. You can look at scraping search engines like DuckDuckGo or Yahoo because they can also provide you with unique results for your searches. Any of these activities will require you to utilize datacenter rotating proxies or other tools for IP rotation. These proxy for scraping software will allow you to stay protected from bans and other restrictions.
How to Scrape Bing Search Results
Bing search results can be scraped through regular scraping software or through APIs and simplified apps. Bing sells APIs for searching directly, and you can even try the free plan to test if the project is getting needed results.
In this guide, we will talk about scraping Bing search results with Python and a proxy for Bing scraping. To start, we need to make a new folder and install all of the libraries there. We need to add the BeautifulSoup and Requests libraries to start our project. Without them, we won’t be able to perform HTTP connections and manage data harvesting.
Then, inside the created folder, you need to make a new Python file and add code for parsing titles, links, and descriptions from each search result. After this, you should use BS4 to make a tree for the harvested data. In our case, all HTML tree will be stored in a completeData variable. This variable will also store all of the elements that we will harvest. You can find the location of all needed elements through the Developers Tools menu in the browser. For example, descriptions will be stored under the div tag. Now we can finally combine all of this into a loop and store the collected data by using the array. This way, we scraped our first page of Bing search results. In the same way, you can continue collecting data from any other pages of this kind with any needed keyword. This technique can also use web scraping to generate leads or manage other SEO related tasks.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.
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What is Bing SERP parsing?
SERP stands for search engine result pages. So Bing SERP parsing is basically harvesting information from any Bing search result page.
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What proxies are the best to use for scraping Bing?
Residential proxies will be the ultimate and universal solution in this case. This kind of proxy won't fit your needs; you can look at datacenter proxies or rotating residential proxies.
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What data can be collected from Bing search results?
You can scrape basic results components like title, url, and description. But you can also collect all the other data that the search result contains.
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