Does anyone know who to do this

Hi,

Basically here is the scenario:

A browser wants to find a cheap bike on the internet. He goes to a website and fills in there form with all the required criteria. When pressing submit the form activates a perl spider which goes of and searches the web for the cheapest price for the bike and brings the results back to the website.

As you can see it is very complicated but any help would be gratefully.

He can go to http://www.clickthebutton.com and download their software.

Seriously though, I had a friend who was trying to duplicate ClicktheButton.com's software but couldn't do it. Turns out they have a deal with many of the shopping sites giving them access to their databases and pricing information.

You could of course build a query string and tack it onto a url, but there's no guarantee that you'll be able to find the price the same way for every given page.

Thanks for your suggestion, but i need an English version that can run of our server which clickthebutton.com doesn't.

The only way you can get this to work without having direct access to the database of other companies is by setting the spider to search certain sites (criteria and URL etc you will have to set for each site) , then bring back the results and strip out the prices (using regular expressions) and display them on your site , but this could get quite complicated because the criteria and getting the price from the reuslts will be diffrent for every site.

Clickbutton dont search the whole net just some partner networks which they must have ablity to get data from their backend. I have done stuff like this to get prices but only off one site , so for mutiple it is just a little more complicated

But beacuse you will be stripping the price out of HTML if the other company changes its desgin or search vars you are in trouble

I have just had a look at shopsmart.co.uk and i dont think they are using a spider i think and i could be very wrong here that they have a dbase of which is updated or they link to other db's you could of course do the search on Shopsmart and display the reuslts on your pahe just a little manioulation needed with perl, but you will need permission from Shopsmat because they would notice the traffic.

Waseem

waseem

Thanks for your help Waseem. I always knew it was going to be a complicated project. Maybe i should go the db way as it sounds lot more easier.