Scrape Bing Videos with Python

Contents: intro, imports, what will be scraped, process, code, extracting all videos, links, outro.

Intro

This blog post was requested by Rosalex A and is a follow-up to the Bing web scraping series. Here you'll see how to scrape Video Results using Python with beautifulsoup, requests, lxml, and selenium libraries.

You'll see two approaches:

scrape up to 10 video results with beautifulsoup.

scrape all video results using selenium by scrolling to the end of search results.

Note: This blog post assumes that you're familiar with beautifulsoup, requests, and selenium libraries as well as have basic experience with CSS selectors.

Imports

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests, lxml
from selenium import webdriver

What will be scraped

Process

Selecting CSS selectors for container, title, video url, number of views, channel name, platform, date published. CSS selectors reference.

Code

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests, lxml

headers = {
    "User-Agent":
    "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.114 Safari/537.36"
}

params = {
    "q": "somebody toucha my spaghet",
    "cc": "us" # language/country of the search
}

html = requests.get('https://www.bing.com/videos/search', params=params, headers=headers)
soup = BeautifulSoup(html.text, 'lxml')

for result in soup.select('.mc_vtvc.b_canvas'):
    title = result.select_one('.b_promtxt').text
    link = f"https://www.bing.com{result.select_one('.mc_vtvc_link')['href']}"
    views = result.select_one('.mc_vtvc_meta_row:nth-child(1) span:nth-child(1)').text
    date = result.select_one('.mc_vtvc_meta_row:nth-child(1) span+ span').text
    video_platform = result.select_one('.mc_vtvc_meta_row+ .mc_vtvc_meta_row span:nth-child(1)').text
    channel_name = result.select_one('.mc_vtvc_meta_row_channel').text
    print(f'{title}\n{link}\n{channel_name}\n{video_platform}\n{date}\n{views}\n')

----------------------
'''
THE THREE BEARS (1939)
https://www.bing.comhttps://www.bilibili.com/video/av18046604/
fibration
bilibili
Jan 7, 2018
566 views

SOMEBODY TOUCHA MY SPAGHET - Harmonised
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=somebody+toucha+my+spaghet&&view=detail&mid=A98F1E15564EFBCDA08EA98F1E15564EFBCDA08E&&FORM=VRDGAR
Mirron
YouTube
Jun 16, 2020
12K views
...
'''

Extracting all videos

To extract all videos we need to scroll the page downwards, then click on the button when it appears and scroll down again to the end of video results.

To scroll down with Selenium you can use .send_keys() method.

driver.find_element_by_xpath('xpath').send_keys(Keys.KEYBOARD_KEY) 
# in our case .send_keys(Keys.END) to scroll to the bottom of the page

You can also execute script by calling the DOM as I did in YouTube Search web scraping series, but it didn't work for me in this situation, or I was doing something wrong.

driver.execute_script("var scrollingElement = (document.scrollingElement || document.body);scrollingElement.scrollTop = scrollingElement.scrollHeight;")
# https://stackoverflow.com/a/57076690/15164646 (contains several references)

Then, clicking. To click you have only one option: .click() method.

driver.find_element_by_css_selector('.selector').click()

Full code to extract all video results

import time
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='path/to/chromedriver.exe')
driver.get('https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=somebody+toucha+my+spaghet&FORM=HDRSC3&cc=us')
time.sleep(1)

# scrolls until "more videos" button is located
while True:
    # return False 
    end_result = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="bop_coll"]').is_displayed()
    driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="b-scopeListItem-video"]/a').send_keys(Keys.END)
    # when returns True, breaks out of the while loop
    if end_result == True:
        break

# wait for button to load, clicks on "more videos" button and continues code execution
time.sleep(2)
driver.find_element_by_css_selector('.mBtn').click()


# scrolls until the end of the video result with 60 retries buffer to break out of the while loop.
# this block of code works but could be better implemented.
# if you know a better solution, please, write in the comments below and I'll change this section to a better one.

# https://stackoverflow.com/a/34885906/15164646
tries = 60
for i in range(tries):
    while True:
        try:
            driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="b-scopeListItem-video"]/a').send_keys(Keys.END)
        except:
            if i < tries - 1:
                continue
            else:
                raise
        break

# when 2 while loops executed it will iterate over every found element
# try/except used because sometimes there are no such elements being displayed
for index, result in enumerate(driver.find_elements_by_css_selector('.mc_vtvc.b_canvas')):
    title = result.find_element_by_css_selector('.b_promtxt').text
    link = f"https://www.bing.com{result.find_element_by_css_selector('.mc_vtvc_link').get_attribute('href')}"
    try:
        views = result.find_element_by_css_selector('.mc_vtvc_meta_row:nth-child(1) span:nth-child(1)').text
    except:
        views = None

    try:
        date = result.find_element_by_css_selector('.mc_vtvc_meta_row:nth-child(1) span+ span').text
    except:
        date = None

    try:
        video_platform = result.find_element_by_css_selector('.mc_vtvc_meta_row+ .mc_vtvc_meta_row span:nth-child(1)').text
    except:
        video_platform = None

    try:
        channel_name = result.find_element_by_css_selector('.mc_vtvc_meta_row_channel').text
    except:
        channel_name = None

    print(f'{index}\n{title}\n{link}\n{channel_name}\n{video_platform}\n{date}\n{views}\n')
driver.quit()

----------------------------
'''
1 # first element result
SOMEBODY ONCE TOUCHA MY SPAGHET
https://www.bing.comhttps://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=somebody+toucha+my+spaghet&&view=detail&mid=894647969BE1D540909A894647969BE1D540909A&&FORM=VRDGAR
FlyingKitty
YouTube
Jan 20, 2018
8.2M views

...

594 # last element result
BEST MEMES COMPILATION #49
https://www.bing.comhttps://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=somebody+toucha+my+spaghet&&view=detail&mid=05F78AB366F6D32E579305F78AB366F6D32E5793&&FORM=VRDGAR
H-Matter
YouTube
1 week ago
318K views
'''

The GIF is sped up by a 1550%

Links

Outro

Selenium isn't the fastest solution, but it gives an ability to scroll until no more results are shown. Other steps might be to add async functionality to this code.

If you have any questions or something isn't working correctly or you want to write something else, feel free to drop a comment in the comment section or via Twitter at @serp_api.

Yours,
Dimitry, and the rest of SerpApi Team.