Website Scraping Advantages With PHP

Advantages of Scraping With PHP

Scraping web site data has many advantages to anyone who likes to sort through data to find a great bargain, a great job, or cheap auction item; just to mention a few. After you hear how your non-techie friends spend hours sorting through Ebay and Craigslist to find bargains, you may conclude how convenient it can be for your simple php application to scrape data and email you when it finds you the gold you are seeking.

Since many web pages will have different patterns of html to output specific categories and entries, you will need to build scrapers that can grab and analyze data at a very specific level. However, you can use one tool for scraping and alter the code of your tool when you need it to be specific for a certain page.

Website Scraping Example
Let’s assume you have already built and use a scraping tool to scrape an auction site for a specific line of digital cameras (which you plan to resell at your camera shop). Now, you want to use that tool to scrape a web page that has hotel deals in Los Angeles. Since you fly to LA frequently for business, it makes sense to get the best rate. Even sites that offer the best rates can be scraped to find absolute bargains amongst the discounted rates. Therefore, you go to the page that sorts your class of hotel and city. Once you have found the page where you get your deals, you simply alter your original scraping tool to get all those listings which have more than a 75% discount and price is less than $30. Since you run a cron job every ten minutes for your scraper, you receive the text message when the bargain lands on the page. You can go one step further and store the data in your database using its specific id and text you scrape. This way, you can do a check and the cron will only send a single text message if the item had not been stored in the database. Now, you could have a password protected web page that outputs all links to the website where you can buy the bargain.

In the end, you simply get notified about your bargains and you can open you custom page to link back to the mother website where the deal can be purchased.

December 2, 2012 by kent