I am trying to scrape a returned set of business licenses from a municipal site that whenever you use a search term, let's say 'Fuel', it appears to be handled by a jQuery script that returns the results. The problem is, I have been unable to reproduce the search string the site sends to their database. Using the element inspector in my browser, as well as monitoring the network traffic sent to the site from my computer, doesn't reveal how the results are obtained. The results are clearly visible in my browser and in the source code, but as I using the 'requests' library, I can't accomplish the same results as I can't replicate their search command.

Is there anyway to find the actual search parameters or, if I believe what is happening is correct, which is the search term is handled by java script and jquery to return the results, am I out of luck due to the javascript handling the search feature?

Thanks and I apologize for my poor description. Although I have done many websites in the past, I have never needed to interface with a database so the backend part kind of eludes me.