Scope
This prototype was not treated as a general downloader. The correct use case is finding legally public or public-domain material and preserving license checks as a required step.
The session focused on making the minimum search-to-result flow work.
Completed work
The review covered:
- understanding the execution flow
- adding
requirements.txt - confirming the Google-based flow
- observing Google’s
sorryand reCAPTCHA blocking behavior - switching the search backend from Google to Bing
- parsing Bing results
- decoding Bing tracking links into original URLs
- fixing a Selenium
expected_conditionsimport bug - fixing JSON serialization for
Pathvalues - writing result JSON under a local
result/directory
Architecture
The CLI takes book information, drives a browser search through Selenium, collects candidate URLs, and stores structured result data.
The important design point is that search results are not automatically trusted. A result needs additional signals before it can be considered usable.
Takeaway
The prototype became more stable after replacing brittle Google scraping with a less blocked search path and fixing serialization issues. The next quality bar would be stronger license classification and cleaner separation between search, parsing, scoring, and output.
