Scrape Naver Video Results in Python

What will be scraped

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge scraping with CSS selectors

If you haven't scraped with CSS selectors, there's a dedicated blog post of mine about how to use CSS selectors when web-scraping that covers what it is, pros and cons, and why they matter from a web-scraping perspective.

CSS selectors declare which part of the markup a style applies to, thus allowing you to extract data from matching tags and attributes.

Separate virtual environment

If you haven't worked with a virtual environment before, have a look at the dedicated Python virtual environments tutorial using Virtualenv and Poetry blog post of mine to get familiar.

In short, it's a thing that creates an independent set of installed libraries including different Python versions that can coexist with each
other at the same system, thus preventing libraries or Python version conflicts.

📌Note: This is not a strict requirement for this blog post, rather a reminder.

Install libraries

pip install requests, parsel

Reduce the chance of being blocked

There's a chance that a request might be blocked. Have a look at how to reduce the chance of being blocked while web-scraping, there are eleven methods to bypass blocks from most websites.

Full Code

import requests, os, json
from parsel import Selector


def parsel_scrape_naver_videos():
    params = {
        "query": "minecraft",  # search query
        "where": "video"       # video results
    }

    headers = {
        "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.87 Safari/537.36",
    }

    html = requests.get("https://search.naver.com/search.naver", params=params, headers=headers, timeout=30)
    selector = Selector(html.text)  # very similar to bs4, except parsel supports Xpath 

    video_results = []

    for video in selector.css(".video_bx"):
        # https://parsel.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html#using-selectors
        title = video.css(".text::text").get()
        link = video.css(".info_title::attr(href)").get()
        thumbnail = video.css(".thumb_area img::attr(src)").get()
        channel = video.css(".channel::text").get()
        origin = video.css(".origin::text").get()
        video_duration = video.css(".time::text").get()
        views = video.css(".desc_group .desc:nth-child(1)::text").get()
        date_published = video.css(".desc_group .desc:nth-child(2)::text").get()

        video_results.append({
            "title": title,
            "link": link,
            "thumbnail": thumbnail,
            "channel": channel,
            "origin": origin,
            "video_duration": video_duration,
            "views": views,
            "date_published": date_published
        })
    
    print(json.dumps(video_results, indent=2, ensure_ascii=False))

Pass search query parameters and request headers:

def parsel_scrape_naver_videos():
    # https://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/quickstart/#passing-parameters-in-urls
    params = {
        "query": "minecraft",  # search query
        "where": "video"       # video results
    }

    # https://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/quickstart/#custom-headers
    headers = {
        "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.87 Safari/537.36",
    }

Pass URL parameters, request headers, make a request and pass returned HTML to parsel:

html = requests.get("https://search.naver.com/search.naver", params=params, headers=headers, timeout=30)
selector = Selector(html.text)  # very similar to bs4, except parsel supports Xpath

Create temporary list to store the data and extract all data:

video_results = []

    # https://parsel.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html#using-selectors
    for video in selector.css(".video_bx"):
        title = video.css(".text::text").get()
        link = video.css(".info_title::attr(href)").get()
        thumbnail = video.css(".thumb_area img::attr(src)").get()
        channel = video.css(".channel::text").get()
        origin = video.css(".origin::text").get()
        video_duration = video.css(".time::text").get()
        views = video.css(".desc_group .desc:nth-child(1)::text").get()
        date_published = video.css(".desc_group .desc:nth-child(2)::text").get()

Code	Explanation
`::text` or `::attr(attribute)`	to extract text or attriubte value from the node.
`get()`	to get actual data.

Print the data:

# ensure_ascii=False to properly display Hangul characters
print(json.dumps(video_results, indent=2, ensure_ascii=False))

Part of returned data:

[
  {
    "title": " : 🌲 How to build Survival Wooden Base (#3)",
    "link": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6crYM0D4DI",
    "thumbnail": "https://search.pstatic.net/common/?src=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2Fn6crYM0D4DI%2Fmqdefault.jpg&type=ac612_350",
    "channel": "소피 Sopypie",
    "origin": "Youtube",
    "video_duration": "24:06",
    "views": "671",
    "date_published": "4일 전"
  },
  {
    "title": "마인크래프트 무한순환 이론 (",
    "link": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ7wyG9mShQ",
    "thumbnail": "https://search.pstatic.net/common/?src=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FkQ7wyG9mShQ%2Fmqdefault.jpg&type=ac612_350",
    "channel": "TV블루위키",
    "origin": "Youtube",
    "video_duration": "01:44",
    "views": "9만",
    "date_published": "2022.02.15."
  } ... other results
]

Alternatively, you can achieve the same by using Naver Video Results API from SerpApi which is a paid API with a free plan.

The difference is that there's no need to create the parser from scratch, maintain it and figure out how to scale it without being blocked.

import os
from serpapi import NaverSearch

def serpapi_scrape_naver_videos():
    params = {
        "api_key": os.getenv("API_KEY"),  # your serpapi api key
        "engine": "naver",                # parsing engine
        "query": "minecraft",             # search query
        "where": "video"                  # video results
    }

    search = NaverSearch(params)          # where data extraction happens
    results = search.get_dict()           # JSON -> Python dictionary

    video_results = []

    # iterate over video results and extract desired data
    for video in results["video_results"]:
        video_results.append({
            "title": video["title"],
            "link": video["link"],
            "duration": video["duration"],
            "views": video.get("views"),
            "pub_date": video.get("publish_date"),
            "thumbnail": video["thumbnail"],
            "channel_name": video.get("channel", {}).get("name"),
            "channel_link": video.get("channel", {}).get("link")
        })

    print(json.dumps(video_results, indent=2, ensure_ascii=False))

Part of returned data:

[
  {
    "title": "Minecraft : 🌲 How to build Survival Wooden Base (#3)",
    "link": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6crYM0D4DI",
    "duration": "24:06",
    "views": "671",
    "pub_date": "4일 전",
    "thumbnail": "https://search.pstatic.net/common/?src=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2Fn6crYM0D4DI%2Fmqdefault.jpg&type=ac612_350",
    "channel_name": "소피 Sopypie",
    "channel_link": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCuuRWM5JTvYBnbufwJ4E5Q"
  },
  {
    "title": "마인크래프트 무한순환 이론 (Minecraft) [블루위키]",
    "link": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ7wyG9mShQ",
    "duration": "01:44",
    "views": "9만",
    "pub_date": "2022.02.15.",
    "thumbnail": "https://search.pstatic.net/common/?src=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FkQ7wyG9mShQ%2Fmqdefault.jpg&type=ac612_350",
    "channel_name": "TV블루위키",
    "channel_link": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQreDC73rqiw1wSc_ZYwgHA"
  } ... other results 
]

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