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Is this impossible or just difficult to do?

by q1w2e3r4t5
1 replies
Hello,

I don't know if you all have been to (bing-vs-google . com) but if you search for something, the results provide a side-by-side presentation of the results.

Now I want to do that with a a group of other sites. I don't need the whole website and the results page compared, just the results. I've made a blue print of what I am trying to do. You can see it at:

ShopperGeek . com/demo



Now these 5 sites have API and data-feed programs but I am not a part of them (nor can I be).



Is it possible to integrate or access the databases of these 5 sites without being an affiliate and having access to their affiliate/API/data resources.

I am not concerned with earning affiliate commissions, I simply want to have access to these 5 sites and provide my users with that service.

I had a programmer who claimed he could do it but then told me he couldn't.




Is this impossible or simply difficult?

I would appreciate some answers and advice.


Thanks,
Omar
#difficult #impossible
  • Profile picture of the author Steve Diamond
    Without access to the APIs it's more difficult but it's certainly not impossible.

    Anything that a human web user can pull up by using the search function on any of those sites can be scraped and redisplayed however you like.

    There are two moderately difficult challenges:
    1. Designing the searching, scraping, and displaying rules, which will vary from site to site. One tricky part will be to try and ensure that search results really are for matching items, as there's no guarantee that the same search string will bring the same results on each site.
    2. Keeping an eye on each site to see when they change their page layouts. Without the API, the searching and scraping routines will fail if they don't know exactly what each site's pages look like, and this can change over time.
    It would be a fun but tricky project, requiring lots of trial and error to get it perfectly right. For example, on any of the sites it's possible that search results pages look different in different departments. So you'd have to know which department you're in at all times and design the rules accordingly. It could get very complicated.

    Steve
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