Selenium webdriver click google search

Question

I'm searching text "Cheese!" on google homepage and unsure how can I can click on the searched links after pressing the search button. For example I wanted to click the third link from top on search page then how can I find identify the link and click on it. My code so far:

package mypackage;

import org.openqa.selenium.By; 

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement; 
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.ExpectedCondition;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver; 
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.WebDriverWait;

public class myclass {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\selenium-java-2.35.0\\chromedriver_win32_2.2\\chromedriver.exe");

         WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(); 
         driver.get("http://www.google.com"); 
         WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.name("q"));
         element.sendKeys("Cheese!");
         element.submit();

         //driver.close();
    }



}

d0x · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-22T18:19:02.770

Google shrinks their css classes etc., so it is not easy to identify everything.

Also you have the problem that you have to "wait" until the site shows the result. I would do it like this:

public static void main(String[] args) {

    WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
    driver.get("http://www.google.com");
    WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.name("q"));
    element.sendKeys("Cheese!\n"); // send also a "\n"
    element.submit();

    // wait until the google page shows the result
    WebElement myDynamicElement = (new WebDriverWait(driver, 10))
              .until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.id("resultStats")));

    List<WebElement> findElements = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//*[@id='rso']//h3/a"));

    // this are all the links you like to visit
    for (WebElement webElement : findElements)
    {
        System.out.println(webElement.getAttribute("href"));
    }
}

This will print you:

I'm not sure if these comments are allowed but this code no longer works due to google updating their naming. You need to replace "resultStats" with "result-stats" — John Hon, Apr 20 '21 at 08:55

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 04 '17 at 18:31

@Test
public void google_Search()
{
    WebDriver driver;
    driver = new FirefoxDriver();
    driver.get("http://www.google.com");
    driver.manage().window().maximize();

    WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.name("q"));
    element.sendKeys("Cheese!\n");
    element.submit();

    //Wait until the google page shows the result
    WebElement myDynamicElement = (new WebDriverWait(driver, 10)).until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.id("resultStats")));

    List<WebElement> findElements = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//*[@id='rso']//h3/a"));

    //Get the url of third link and navigate to it
    String third_link = findElements.get(2).getAttribute("href");
    driver.navigate().to(third_link);
}

Amey · Answer 3 · 2013-08-22T18:26:41.357

There would be multiple ways to find an element (in your case the third Google Search result).

One of the ways would be using Xpath

#For the 3rd Link
driver.findElement(By.xpath(".//*[@id='rso']/li[3]/div/h3/a")).click();
#For the 1st Link
driver.findElement(By.xpath(".//*[@id='rso']/li[2]/div/h3/a")).click();
#For the 2nd Link
driver.findElement(By.xpath(".//*[@id='rso']/li[1]/div/h3/a")).click();

The other options are

By.ByClassName 
By.ByCssSelector 
By.ById
By.ByLinkText
By.ByName
By.ByPartialLinkText 
By.ByTagName

To better understand each one of them, you should try learning Selenium on something simpler than the Google Search Result page.

Example - http://www.google.com/intl/gu/contact/

To Interact with the Text input field with the placeholder "How can we help? Ask here." You could do it this way -

# By.ByClassName 
driver.findElement(By.ClassName("searchbox")).sendKeys("Hey!");
# By.ByCssSelector 
driver.findElement(By.CssSelector(".searchbox")).sendKeys("Hey!");
# By.ById
driver.findElement(By.Id("query")).sendKeys("Hey!");
# By.ByName
driver.findElement(By.Name("query")).sendKeys("Hey!");
# By.ByXpath
driver.findElement(By.xpath(".//*[@id='query']")).sendKeys("Hey!");

Petr Mensik · Answer 4 · 2013-08-25T11:51:06.333

1

Based on quick inspection of google web, this would be CSS path to links in page list

ol[id="rso"] h3[class="r"] a

So you should do something like

String path = "ol[id='rso'] h3[class='r'] a";
driver.findElements(By.cssSelector(path)).get(2).click();

However you could also use xpath which is not really recommended as a best practice and also JQuery locators but I am not sure if you can use them aynywhere else except inArquillian Graphene

edited Aug 25 '13 at 11:51

answered Aug 22 '13 at 18:05

Petr Mensik

26,874
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This is the error I'm getting "The method css(String) is undefined for the type By" – min2bro Aug 23 '13 at 15:02

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 04 '14 at 16:51

0

Simple Xpath for locating Google search box is: Xpath=//span[text()='Google Search']

answered Aug 04 '14 at 16:51

Anand

1

score 0 · Answer 6 · edited Aug 04 '14 at 18:28

0

public class GoogleSearch {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        WebDriver driver=new FirefoxDriver();
        driver.get("http://www.google.com");
        driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@type='text']")).sendKeys("Cheese");   
        driver.findElement(By.xpath("//button[@name='btnG']")).click();
        driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30,TimeUnit.SECONDS); 
        driver.findElement(By.xpath("(//h3[@class='r']/a)[3]")).click();
        driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30,TimeUnit.SECONDS); 
    }
}

edited Aug 04 '14 at 18:28

Jens

6,275
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answered Aug 04 '14 at 18:07

Anand

1

Welcome to Stack Overflow. You should add an explaination to your answer that describes how your code helps solving the problem at hand and how it is an addition to the previously posted answers. – Jens Aug 04 '14 at 18:29

Pedro Lobito · Answer 7 · 2018-11-30T20:12:16.120

Most of the answers on this page are outdated.
Here's an updated python version to search google and get all results href's:

import urllib.parse
import re
from selenium import webdriver
driver.get("https://google.com/")
q = driver.find_element_by_name('q')
q.send_keys("always look on the bright side of life monty python")
q.submit();
sleep(1)
links= driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//h3[@class='r']//a")
for link in links:
    url = urllib.parse.unquote(webElement.get_attribute("href")) # decode the url
    url = re.sub("^.*?(?:url\?q=)(.*?)&sa.*", r"\1", url, 0, re.IGNORECASE) # get the clean url

Please note that the element id/name/class (@class='r') ** will change depending on the user agent**.
The above code used PhantomJS default user agent.

Selenium webdriver click google search

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