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How can I bypass the Google CAPTCHA using Selenium and Python?

When I try to scrape something, Google give me a CAPTCHA. Can I bypass the Google CAPTCHA with Selenium Python?

As an example, it's Google reCAPTCHA. You can see this CAPTCHA via this link: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo

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    umm.. Then what's the point of a captcha? Commented Nov 15, 2019 at 7:59
  • I think the only way if you want to bypass a captcha is to use someone else's service. You pass them your captcha, they return you the text. Commented Nov 15, 2019 at 8:02
  • Sounds more do-able. I'm not going to try it. Probably find the coordinates of the checkbox element, send a click. Commented Nov 15, 2019 at 8:17
  • However, how are you getting captchas in the first place? Some of your actions must have triggered google to think you are a robot. Commented Nov 15, 2019 at 8:19
  • @HjSin I will improve that but can you please tell me how to bypass captcha Commented Nov 15, 2019 at 8:21

4 Answers 4

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To start with using Selenium's Python clients, you should avoid solving/bypass Google CAPTCHA.

Selenium

Selenium automates browsers. Now, what you want to achieve with that power is entirely up to individuals, but primarily it is for automating web applications through browser clients for testing purposes and of course it is certainly not limited to that.

CAPTCHA

On the other hand, CAPTCHA (the acronym being ...Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart...) is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine if the user is human.

So, Selenium and CAPTCHA serves two completely different purposes and ideally shouldn't be used to achieve any interrelated tasks.

Having said that, reCAPTCHA can easily detect the network traffic and identify your program as a Selenium driven bot.

Generic Solution

However, there are some generic approaches to avoid getting detected while web scraping:

This use case

However, in a couple of use cases we were able to interact with the reCAPTCHA using Selenium and you can find more details in the following discussions:

References

You can find a couple of related discussion in:

tl; dr

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3 Comments

Could you please elaborate more on "the conventional Viewport"? What does it refer to?
Changing my viewport to 100, 100 worked for me.
I think HTTP cookies are important too. How you read it, keep it and when to clear them can help in some situations to avoid captchas
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In order to bypass the CAPTCHA when scraping Google, you have to manually solve a CAPTCHA and export the cookies Google gives you. Now, every time you open a Selenium WebDriver, make sure you add the cookies you exported. The GOOGLE_ABUSE_EXEMPTION cookie is the one you're looking for, but I would save all cookies just to be on the safe side.

If you want an additional layer of stability in your scrapes, you should export several cookies and have your script randomly select one of them each time you ping Google.

These cookies have a long expiration date so you wouldn't need to get new cookies every day.

For help on saving and loading cookies in Python and Selenium, you should check out this answer: How to save and load cookies using Python + Selenium WebDriver

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Hello, I'm new to using cookies; after finding the GOOGLE_ABUSE_EXEMPTION cookie, how do you use that specific cookie? Read the link you provided, but that seems like it saves the cookie from the previous session, rather than a specific cookie value that we already have
Hi, Yu Na! The link shows how to save all cookies and then load them. I tried it in my code and it works like a charm. If there's a specific roadblock you're having, open up a new SO question with your code example and PM me the link so I can see if I can help :)
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Clear Browsing History, cached data, cookies and other site data First Create an Google Account while you are in browser window opened by selenium. Sign in to your account

wd.get("https://accounts.google.com/signin/v2/identifier?hl=en&passive=true&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F%3Fgws_rd%3Dssl&ec=GAZAmgQ&flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=ServiceLogin"); Thread.sleep(2000); wd.findElement(By.name("identifier")).sendKeys("Email"+Keys.ENTER); Thread.sleep(3000); wd.findElement(By.name("password")).sendKeys("Password"+Keys.ENTER); Thread.sleep(5000);

Then Open any website that uses recaptcha tick on checkmark using this code

String framename=wd.findElement(By.tagName("iframe")).getAttribute("name"); wd.switchTo().frame(framename); wd.findElement(By.xpath("//span[@id='recaptcha-anchor']")).click();

You won't find any Puzzles or anything.

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Bypass as in solve it or bypass as in never get it at all?

To solve it:

  • sign up with 2captcha, capmonster cloud, deathbycaptcha, etc. and follow their instructions. They will give you a token that you pass with the form.

To never get it at all:

  • Make sure you have good IP reputation (most important for Cloudflare).
  • Make sure you have a good browser fingerprint (most important for Distil) - I recommend puppeteer + the stealth plugin.
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