When I try to crawl Google for search results, Scrapy just yields the Google home page: http://pastebin.com/FUbvbhN4
Here is my spider:
import scrapy
for the most cases, google would redirect the spider to the CAPTCHA page, bing search result is easier to crawl.
there is a project for crawling search result from Google/Bing/Baidu https://github.com/titantse/seCrawler
Yes, looks like that address is redirecting to the home page:
example with scrapy shell http://www.google.com/#q=finance.google.com:+3m+co
:
...
[s] request <GET http://www.google.com/#q=finance.google.com:+3m+co>
[s] response <200 http://www.google.com/>
...
Checking your url it makes sense, it isn't containing parameters, but #q
(which isn't a url parameter) and the browser is the one recognizing that and making it a google search, so it is not exactly a url path.
the correct google search url is: http://www.google.com/search?q=YOURQUERY