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I'm interested in keeping an eye on which advertising networks are running on a variety of websites. The Ghostery browser plugin does a great job of showing me which ad networks are used on any website. For example, on StackOverflow, Ghostery says we're being monitored by DoubleClick, Google Analytics, Quantcast, and ScoreCard.

On a weekly basis, I'd like to use Selenium to automatically browse few hundred websites and save the Ghostery data associated with these websites. Using the Python bindings for Selenium, I wrote out some rough pseudocode:

import selenium.webdriver as webdriver
urls = ['www.stackoverflow.com', 'www.amazon.com', ...]
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
for url in urls:
    driver.get(url)
    # now, how do I access Ghostery's analysis of this URL?

I suppose the broader question is "from Selenium, how do I connect to other browser plugins?"

For fun, I posted an example of what Ghostery's UI looks like (which I'd like to access programmatically):

enter image description here

solvingPuzzles
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3 Answers3

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Selenium is used to access and interact with a browser's DOM. Selenium is not able to access a browser's controls; it is a completely inappropriate tool for what you want to accomplish.

SiKing
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  • Ah, I hadn't thought of that--thanks for your help. Perhaps there would be an other browser automation system that could parse this data? (Or, I could just write my own code to look through the DOM for trackers.) – solvingPuzzles Jul 05 '14 at 00:47
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In general, its not possible for Selenium to access extensions directly. If you want to do that, you will have to build a bridge.

For Ghostery specifically, what you are looking for exists as an open source project here: https://github.com/ghostery/areweprivateyet

fixanoid
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There appears to be a limited Ghostery API described at https://purplebox.ghostery.com/post/1016023438#more-1016023438

msw
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