I am working on a project that needs us to parse scraped Google search results. One reason I am apprehensive is because Google could change the styles and classes and that could break our system. But I wonder if they actually do that frequently. Can people here who have scraped Google tools before let me know if this is something I should be concerned about? Or is this something that happens once in a year or two, and so I don't have to worry much.
I have and many others have as well, even Bing did it before I found a pretty detailed answer that would answer your question. Reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22657548/is-it-ok-to-scrape-data-from-google-results
Thanks Markus. My question was specifically about how frequently does Google change the onsite CSS and other elements since the parsing needs to be tweaked every time they make such a change. Do you have any idea about this?
Sorry if I missed that. I could not find any direct information in regards to this but google has had a fairly similar layout over the years. I do not believe that their changing layout would be an issue. You would however run into other problems depending on what you are trying to do, like personalized search results for example. This would mean that every user could end up with a completely different search result. But how much this affects you depends on what you are doing of course. Please note that I am thinking of possible future issues.
Thank you Markus. Currently, all the organic search results go under a div class named 'srg'. Even if it changes by a text, it would mean I will have to change the parsing script at my end. I am just going to go with this and hope Google doesn't give too much trouble here.
I don't know how frequent but they do change their code. I recently bought a Youtube scrapper and after using it only for some 3 months, it stopped working. I asked the owner and he told me that it was due to Youtube update.