well... honestly i don't know how to write PHP scripts that will do this,
but...
maybe i can point you in the right direction...
sounds like what you're talking about is Data Mining, especially data mining
that incorperates the use of some type of web spidering ability. One product
that we use at my office is IBM's I-Miner -- of which there's I-Miner for
Data, and I-Miner for Text. Data being for examining information that comes
from a database, and Text being examing information that's in some sort of
text format (i.e. HTML / XML pages) and utilizes complex algorythm's to
analyze that data. It's not exactally an inexpensive product, but... It is
very powerful, and probably a lot more than you need.
my guess is there is some sort of open source software that does a similar
thing. I'm all for open source. Our company was going to use IBM's WebSphere
(my boss is a huge IBM fan) but, i talked him out of it, because for our
purposes -- a PHP driven site does everything we need it to do -- and takes
like 1/10000 of the time to code for.... Plus, i'd rather see the difference
in my paycheck ;)
but maybe, if you're one helluva a killer PHP coder, you could do it with
PHP, but... more likely, you'll probably want to find some software that
does some datamining and puts the results into a database, and then you can
use PHP to display the end result.
...as for PriceWatch... I'm not sure if that even uses datamining. I've seen
results on PriceWatch that say some things along the line of "It's this
price ONLY if you mention PriceWatch" -- which to me, is a hint that people
submit their prices to that site, or possibly even pay to participate in it.
But... That's only a best guess.
HTH, and G/L mining :)
-Doug
"Bo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> Hi,
>
> I'm wondering how can I write some php script to scan a couple of(or more)
> websites to find out the lowest price of a particular item? what is the
idea
> behind this kind of programing?
>
> Also, I am always wondering how does the pricewatch website works? (I
don't
> think that they did page by page html, right? How do they grab the data
from
> other websites?)
>
> Thank you and your ideas and info will be much appreciated...
>
> Bo
>
>
--
PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
