When a local search is done on Google, then the user clicks on the 'More ...' link below the map, the user is then brought to a page such as this.
If the URL:
https://www.google.com/ncr#q=chiropractors%2BNew+York,+NY&rflfq=1&rlha=0&tbm=lcl
is copied out and pasted back into a browser, one arrives, as expected, at the same page. Likewise when a browser is opened with WebDriver, directly accessing the URL brings WebDriver to the same page.
When an attempt is made, however, to request the same page with urllib2, Google serves it its home page (google.com), and it means, among other things, that lxml's extraction capabilities cannot be used.
While urllib2 is not the culprit here (perhaps Google does the same with all headless requests), is there any way of getting Google to serve the desired page? A quick tests with the requests
library is indicating the same issue.