Troubleshooting a Selenium Error: Sorry, Something Went Wrong on Our End

Navigating the Challenges of Web Scraping Amazon with Selenium

Hey fellow developers,

Today, I want to share my experience trying to scrape data from Amazon using Selenium. Amazon, as many of you may know, is quite strict about automated access to their site which often results in challenges such as receiving error messages like “Sorry, something went wrong on our end. Please go back and try again.” Initially, adding a user-agent seemed to solve the problem temporarily, but the challenge resurfaced. In this blog post, I’ll walk through the problem and explore practical solutions that helped me overcome these hurdles.

Understanding the Issue

While working on a web scraping project involving Amazon, I faced a persistent issue where Amazon detected that my script was not a regular browser session. Normally, when browsing manually, user activities are associated with certain headers and behaviors that Selenium without proper configuration lacks. This leads to Amazon blocking requests made by Selenium-driven browsers, showing the aforementioned error message.

Here’s the basic script I started with:

from selenium import webdriver

url = 'https://www.amazon.com/s?k=iphone'
browser = webdriver.Chrome()
browser.get(url)

This simple script was meant to search for iPhones on Amazon but ended up with an error most of the time.

Solutions I Tried

1. Changing the User-Agent: The first solution I looked into was altering the browser’s user agent to mimic a real user browsing from a standard browser. This sometimes tricks the website into thinking that the request is coming from a legitimate source.

Here’s how I modified the script:

from selenium import webdriver
    from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

    url = 'https://www.amazon.com/s?k=iphone'
    options = Options()
    options.add_argument("window-size=1200x600")
    options.add_argument('user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36')

    browser = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
    browser.get(url)

This worked initially but wasn’t foolproof.

1. Using Stealth Mode Plugins with Selenium: To better simulate a real user, I also tried using stealth plugins that help bypass some of the common ways sites detect bots. One such plugin is selenium-stealth.

from selenium import webdriver
    from selenium_stealth import stealth

    options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
    options.add_argument("--start-maximized")
    stealth(browser,
            languages=["en-US", "en"],
            vendor="Google Inc.",
            platform="Win32",
            webgl_vendor="Intel Inc.",
            renderer="Intel Iris OpenGL Engine",
            fix_hairline=True,
            )
    browser = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
    browser.get(url)

This approach significantly reduced the likelihood of being detected.

1. Slowing Down the Interaction: Rapid, non-human requests are a red flag for websites. To make the browsing seem more natural, I added delays and randomized timings between different actions.

Final Thoughts

While these methods have improved the situation, remember that frequently scraping websites like Amazon can still lead to your IP being blocked. Always use these techniques responsibly, and consider alternatives such as using the website’s API if available.

Ultimately, while web scraping can be a powerful tool, it also poses ethical and legal considerations that we must not overlook. Always ensure you are compliant with the website’s terms of service and data use policies.

Scraping Amazon or similar sites is challenging but with the right approach and tools, it’s possible to gather data effectively while minimizing the risk of being blocked.