Scrape Yahoo search engine results with R

Learn how to scrape Yahoo search engine results with R using the {rvest} package

Photo by Luca Bravo

Introduction

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites. It is usually done in an automated manner to obtain a large amounts of data through various websites, without the need to gather data by hand.

In a previous post, we introduced this method and illustrated it with a Wikipedia page. Although there are a lot of use cases of web scraping, in this blog post, we are restricting ourselves to scraping search results from Yahoo using R. Scraping search engine results can help you with SEO analysis, competitor analysis, keyword research, trend analysis, etc.

Scraping Yahoo search engine results with R

After installing R and RStudio, we first need to load the necessary packages by running the following commands:1

# install.packages("rvest")
# install.packages("jsonlite")
# install.packages("purrr")

library(rvest)
library(jsonlite)
library(purrr)

The {rvest} package is for web scraping, the {jsonlite} package is for working with JSON data and the {purrr} package is for working with functions and vectors.