soup.select('.r a') in f'https://google.com/search?q={query}' brings back empty list in Python BeautifulSoup. **NOT A DUPLICATE**

Question

The \"I\'m Feeling Lucky!\" project in the \"Automate the boring stuff with Python\" ebook no longer works with the code he provided.

Specifically, the linkElems = s

Answer 1

I took a different route. I saved the HTML from the request and opened that page, then I inspected the elements. It turns out that the page is different if I open it natively in the Chrome browser compared to what my python request is served. I identified the div with the class that appears to denote a result and supplemented that for the .r - in my case it was .kCrYT

#! python3

# lucky.py - Opens several Google Search results.

import requests, sys, webbrowser, bs4

print('Googling...') # display text while the google page is downloading

url= 'http://www.google.com.au/search?q=' + ' '.join(sys.argv[1:])
url = url.replace(' ','+')


res = requests.get(url)
res.raise_for_status()


# Retrieve top search result links.
soup=bs4.BeautifulSoup(res.text, 'html.parser')


# get all of the 'a' tags afer an element with the class 'kCrYT' (which are the results)
linkElems = soup.select('.kCrYT > a') 

# Open a browser tab for each result.
numOpen = min(5, len(linkElems))
for i in range(numOpen):
    webbrowser.open_new_tab('http://google.com.au' + linkElems[i].get('href'))