title: Browser Automation with Selenium: Fingerprints, recognizability and traceability?
body: <p>I want to use selenium/webdriver to simulate a browser and scrape some website-content with it. Even if its not the fastest method, for me it has many advantages such as executing scripts etc.</p>
  
  <p>For many websites it is forbidden to access them via an automated method, for example search engines like google or bing.</p>
  
  <p>For one tool i need to scrape the estimated resultstat from google for several keywords. This will look like the following: simulate the browser that visits google.com and types in a keyword and scrapes the results, then after a little pause type in the next keyword, scrape the results and so on...</p>
  
  <p>My question is: Is it possible for a website to recognize that I'm using selenium to simulate the browser instead of using the browser by hand? Especially the google case gives me some doubts. I know selenium is partly developed by google or at least by some guys working for google. So does leave selenium some fingerprints or isn't it possible to decide if I'm using the browser by myself or simulated by selenium, even for google?</p>