Selenium: Wait until text in WebElement changes

You need to apply the Explicit Wait concept. E.g. wait for an element to become visible:

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CLASS_NAME, 'searchbox')))

Here, it would wait up to 10 seconds checking the visibility of the element every 500 ms.

There is a set of built-in Expected Conditions to wait for and it is also easy to write your custom Expected Condition.

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FYI, here is how we approached it after brainstorming it in the chat. We've introduced a custom Expected Condition that would wait for the element text to change. It helped us to identify when the new search results appear:

import re

import pandas as pd
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support.expected_conditions import _find_element

class text_to_change(object):
    def __init__(self, locator, text):
        self.locator = locator
        self.text = text

    def __call__(self, driver):
        actual_text = _find_element(driver, self.locator).text
        return actual_text != self.text

#Load URL
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get(url)

#Load DataFrame of terms to search for
df = pd.read_csv("searchkey.csv")

#Crawling function    
def crawl(searchkey):
    try: 
        text_before = driver.find_element_by_class_name("ac_results").text 
    except NoSuchElementException: 
        text_before = ""

    searchbox = driver.find_element_by_name("searchbox")
    searchbox.clear()
    searchbox.send_keys(searchkey)
    print "\nSearching for %s ..." % searchkey

    WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
        text_to_change((By.CLASS_NAME, "ac_results"), text_before)
    )

    search_result = driver.find_element_by_class_name("ac_results")
    if search_result.text != "none":
        names = re.match(r"^.*(?=(\())", search_result.text).group().encode("utf-8")
        insrefs = re.findall(r"((?<=\()[0-9]*)", search_result.text)
    if search_result.text == "none":
        names = re.match(r"^.*(?=(\())", search_result.text)
        insrefs = re.findall(r"((?<=\()[0-9]*)", search_result.text)
    return pd.Series([insrefs, names])

#Run crawl    
df[["Insref", "Name"]] = df["ISIN"].apply(crawl)

#Print DataFrame    
print df