Comments by icemclean (Top 1 by date)

icemclean 8-Aug-12 17:01pm View

Wouldn't it be less overhead to go with PHP? That's just my opinion :)

Firstly, you'd need to find the search URL of each site you wanted to get listings from and change the search string so you could retrieve the listings from that site. Then, you'd need to parse the resulting page and take the links.

Unless, of course, the site has an API that you can use.

Scraping like this is generally a bad idea because:
* You are using somebody else's bandwidth to execute the search, which the owner of the site will probably not be too pleased about if they found out.
* The layout of the search page could change at any time, rendering your script useless.
* The structure of the search string could change at any time, also rendering your script useless.
* There may also be legal issues regarding scraping someone else's site.