Scrape Google Organic Results Faster with the New Google Light Search API

Ryan Schafer -

SerpApi's Google Light Search API allows you to collect data from organic results and other basic search features with unprecedented speed. While all of the APIs provided by SerpApi have fast response times and a high success rate (especially with Ludicrous Speed enabled) , the Google Light API allows you to collect Google organic results even faster by skipping some of the other special features returned by the regular Google Search API.

Why scrape organic results from Google?

Organic results are the unpaid search results that appear in search engine results pages or SERPS. We use the term "organic results" to differentiate between paid ads, others special features or enhanced results generated by Google, and the listings that are calculated algorithmically.

Organic results from search engine results pages (SERPS) can be incredibly useful for a wide variety of purposes. This information can be used to track SEO rankings, gather data about competitors, and train LLM models, among other things. Currently the best way to collect accurate organic results from Google is via web scraping.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is a technique that allows you to automate the process of parsing and collecting data from web pages.

While Google, Bing, and other search engines offer their own APIs for accessing data programmatically, this is seldom reflective of search results as they appear when searching manually in a browser. Since web scraping necessarily involves performing an actual search, it returns results that are much truer to a live search experience.

Why use SerpApi?

If you were to implement a Google SERP scraper yourself, you would not only need to write code to parse the data, but update it in response to frequent changes from Google. You would also need to implement proxies and captcha solutions in order to prevent your requests from being blocked. SerpApi takes care of all of this for you.

SerpApi was the first SERP scraping API to come on the scene in 2017. Since then, a number of other scraping APIs have emerged as potential competitors. However, superior success rates and response times, extensive API coverage (over 50 APIs for different search engines and features), and accurate parsing of all available data ensure SerpApi still stands out as a top solution for most users.

SerpApi also provides extensive documentation and around the clock customer support to help make collecting search data a streamlined and painless process.

What is the Google Light Search API?

The Google Light API is an API SerpApi provides for scraping Google Search results pages, that prioritizes speed over special features. When combined with SerpApi's Ludicrous Speed option, the Google Light API has an average response time of less than a second. You can view the current status of the Google Light API and SerpApi's other APIs here. In addition to Organic Results, the Google Light API can parse the following:

When should you use the Google Light Search API ?

You should use the Google Light API if you aren't interested in complex, feature rich results, and just want to get the organic results as quickly as possible.

The Google Light Search API can also be helpful for circumventing pagination inconsistencies, as documented here. The endpoint used with this API responds with greater consistency to pagination parameters.

Currently, the Google Light API also boasts a 100% success rate.

When not to use the Google Light API

Using the Google Light Search API comes at the expense of some of the other special elements and detailed data provided by SerpApi's regular Google Search API. You should use SerpApi's regular Google Search API if you need any of the features listed below, want to retrieve HTML that reflects what a real user would see when searching Google manually, or want to use any of the parameters not supported by the Google Light API.

Here are some of the elements and features not currently parsed when using the Google Light API, that can be obtained using the Google Search API:

Unlike the regular Google Search API, the Google Light Search API also doesn't support the tbm parameter, so it can't be used to perform image, news, patent, video, or shopping searches.

FAQ

Web scraping public data is legal in the US. You can read more about the legality of webscraping here. SerpApi also offers a Legal Shield, meaning we assume responsibility for the act of web scraping assuming your usage is otherwise legal.

What programming language should I use?

Python is the most popular choice. However, depending on your use case, any number of other programming languages might be a better choice. SerpApi provides libraries for most of the popular programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Java, PHP, and more.

Here is an example of using SerpApi's official Python library to get lightning fast search results using the Google Light API:

from serpapi import GoogleSearch

params = {
  "engine": "google_light",
  "q": "Coffee",
  "location": "Austin, Texas, United States",
  "hl": "en",
  "gl": "us",
  "api_key": "c61118b9274a8cbd6313bc83ebd53a1e74e1d51dabba9bc1170b013f05ee2397"
}

search = GoogleSearch(params)
results = search.get_dict()
organic_results = results["organic_results"]

You can find starter code for all of the supported languages here:

SerpApi: Integrations
Easy integration. SerpApi provides integrations in multiple languages. Start integration using your preferred language.
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Does SerpApi have a no-code option?

Yes, there are several ways to use SerpApi without writing any code. For simple use cases, the easiest is https://nocodeserpapi.com/, which provides out of the box solutions for extracting search results and exporting them to Excel. At this time, the Google Light Search API is not yet supported for https://nocodeserpapi.com/. However, SerpApi also offers a Google Sheets extension which can be used to pull data directly into a Google Sheet using any of SerpApi's APIs. It's also possible to use SerpApi with Make.com, n8n, or other third party no-code tools.

Conclusion

In summary, SerpApi provides an easy and effective way to scrape organic results from search results pages, regardless of whether you are a programmer or a no-code user. The Google Light API allows you to scrape organic results from Google faster than ever before, while taking advantage of SerpApi's streamlined approach, extensive documentation, and premium support.