Comparing Prices online

[BigBear]

I want to access different websites to compare prices and ultimately put this information on my website.

Since I only know Turing, basic C++, and python i would use python.

I have been reading the documentation about using python and the Internet

But short of going to the websites, I can't seem to go to a website and access the search or get prices off of sites.

Does anyone know a better way of doing this?

Or point me in the right direction?

Would this be easier in C++?

[Dan]

There is a Java base project called Web-Harvest that provieds a nice way to harvest data from web sites that don't provied any kind of API: http://web-harvest.sourceforge.net/

Most of the configuration and programming is done via xml based configuartion documents, however it also provieds a Java API.



There is also WSO2, a Mashup Server which might provied what you need if you want to harvest the data for a website: http://wso2.org/projects/mashup



However i would check if the site has an API or web services for reterving the data. Amazon for example provieds a web service based API for querying there product database which would be much more relieable then trying to harvest there site.

There is also Google's Product Search (http://www.google.com/products) which may have an API that cloud be use to simplify things.



P.S. Python should deftaly be able to do this too, i just don't know any good python based APIs/libs for webharvesting off the top of my head.

[BigBear]

How do i find out if a website has an api for accessing certain information?

more specifically i am looking to index flight costs from popular travel websites.