Python Search Engine

1. First check if python3 is installed in your terminal.

python3 --version

2. Next, type python3 to enter python terminal

# Linux or Mac
python3

# Windows
python

3. In the python terminal verify libraries are installed

import requests
import sys
import webbrowser
import bs4

3a. If you have all of the libraries installed move ahead to need to # 4. To import any of the 4 libraries exit out of the python terminal.

# Exits terminal python session
quit()

Install libraries you need

# For Linux and Mac
pip3 install requests
pip3 install sys
pip3 install webbrowser
pip3 install bs4

# For Windows
pip install requests
pip install sys
pip install webbrowser
pip install bs4

4. Now open your text editor and create a new file

browserSearch.py

import requests
import sys
import webbrowser
import bs4

# request to web browser using get() to google url, which concatenates with what you want to search for
# by concatenating the get request to an empty string, and attaching the join() method (which takes two string and concatenates them)
# with the parameter from the system (or command line) using sys.argv, and inside that we want to grab the parameter by using [1:]
res = requests.get('https://google.com/search?q=' + ''.join(sys.argv[1:]))
# takes the first parameter in red and allows us to search for it using raise_for_status() (build in method for this library)
# which enters the queue
res.raise_for_status()
# creating a soup from Beautiful library that passes on the res parameter with text format, then call the HTML parser
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(res.text, "html.parser")
# linkElements is made available which helps take this soup and selects the result which we are getting in this entire HTML parser
# and select only the links by grabbing the regex by going for a total raw request, and select the links
linkElements = soup.select('.r a')
# opening 5 links in the browser, and get length of links
linkToOpen = min(5, len(linkElements))
# loop through linkToOpen and open each link individually in the tab of your browser
for i in range(linkToOpen):
    # opens web browser and pass in the google parameter and concatenate it with linkElements which takes i as a parameter
    # then add a get() request with the parameter href to guide what tags to select
    webbrowser.open('https://google.com' + linkElements[i].get('href'))

To run the program, in the terminal cd to the files location. Type ls to verify you see the .py file, then in the terminal type

python3 browserSearch.py 'what you want to search for'