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Price Comparision Service

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Price Comparision Service
I am looking for a comparision agent, that is either ready made and if someone can tell me more about how to create one or recommend someone.

Many sites now use them:

www.mysimon.com
www.dealtime.com
www.kelkoo.com
etc etc

Is there an off-the-shelf product or is someone planning to create on? If anyone has any news about this please let me know.

Maybe this could be GT next project??? Or course after the next Links release...

Regards,
Alex Beaton
Nobags.com

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Re: Price Comparision Service In reply to
You can do this by tweaking either DBMAN or LINKS. All you have to do is set up mathematical computations in the script to compare fields. Mods like Price Range and other important price comparison tweaks have been applied to DBMAN.

Regards,

Eliot Lee

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Re: Price Comparision Service In reply to
Elliot,

I think he's more concerned with how is the database populated. How do you get the prices from the various on-line services to maintain in a database.



http://www.postcards.com
FAQ: http://www.postcards.com/FAQ/LinkSQL/

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Re: Price Comparision Service In reply to
the merchants sign up to update their own prices.. like shopper.com..

that is their source of revenue..

i am making something like this.. right now..

Jerry Su
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Re: Price Comparision Service In reply to
Jerry,

That would make sense, for a large site, but what about the smaller sites doing the comparasons? Is there a standard format or central clearing house for the data?

This is "valuable" property for a clearing house, but it's the type of information a seller _would_ in general want to spread around as widely as possible.

I've noticed some sites where they actually seem to query the vendor, and others that move so fast, there must be a database behind it (either updated from a list, or spidered).

I have two sites that would benefit from this sort of feature, though.

http://www.postcards.com
FAQ: http://www.postcards.com/FAQ/LinkSQL/

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Re: Price Comparision Service In reply to
it can be spidered i guess.. there are some really nice spiders out there.. i once had one that was like a metacrawler type.. it could search multiple search engines.. all you had to do was make a file.. ie..

yahoo.exp

and then in the file you would have like..

[Number]. <a href="">[Title]</a>
[Description]

and somehow it managed to pluck everything out..

most merchants online have sites that uses IDs for their products..

ie: product.asp?34034

or something.. and then you could put a regular expression on this site and get the dollar amount for that product..

by knowing their format.. ie if they made their price green larger font bold.. then you'd do like..

m#<font size=" 2">\s*?\$?\s*?[\d\.] \s*?</font>#;

this forum seems to totally destroy my original format.. looks like it adds in some \n which are then converted to < br >s

[b]Jerry Su[/b]