unfortunately the search criteria is too diverse to be able to spider it before hand. It has to be when the user searches.
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Spidering/Scraping/Parsing multiple sites - what kind of solutions are there in CF(php/asp) for speed?
My language of choice is ColdFusion and I was wondering if CF can spider multiple sites (say for pricing information) speedily enough. What kind of strategies, if any, could be used/implemented? Whatever the solution is, it would have to be able to be run in a shared hosting environment, so no third party installations would be possible. I'm thinking multithreading is the way to go, but is that the only solution? This piece of code/component would have to search up to 20-30 sites, so I don't want the user to sit there and wait forever. What I have done is similar to mobissimo.com. The page gets reloaded every few 10 seconds or so, and it pulls teh info from the database so at least the user can see that the site is doing something as it adds more and more results to the page.
Would something faster/more elegant be possible in PHP or ASP?
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Answers
Well PHP does make it easy to spider the page.. the code would look something like this:
$html = file_get_contents("http://
That gets all the html from that page into the $html var, where you can regex out whatever you need.
You can also pass additional parameters to file_get_contents, such as authentication credentials and other such headers.
The problem isn't being able to spider one site, but having multiple to do at the the same time.
Say I want to look up prices of a CD. The user types the name, I want to give him prices on Amazon, BN, cdnow, walmart, and 10 other merchants for the best price. I know there are sites out there who can do this very fast, and I'm wondering if php/asp/cf can accomplish this.
Oh I got it. You need to tap into the APIs of these various sites then. For example, Amazon offers an API that you can use to get various information from them:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/b
Here's a product feed specifically:
http://solutions.amazonweb
API is the way to go, for that much information, you don't want to scrap their pages.
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by: rustycpPosted on 2007-04-18 at 17:01:25ID: 18935988
Sounds like you're doing it that way I'd do it. Spider the remote site every few minutes, parse out the info you need, store it in a local database. Then you can just serve database driven pages to the user on your own site.