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Is it possible to create an app using a database from another site on WP?

by Altug
5 replies
Hi folks,

I'm not very techy so the title of this thread is probably not technically correct in relation to exactly what I want to do but i'll do my best to explain

I'd like to get a search engine type thing going on my website which will enable my users to search for calories of food. There are a few websites online that have a real good database of foods and was wondering if it was possible to create a custom search engine using their database for my Wordpress site?

I obviously don't want to just "steal" their database and claim it as my own - I'll have all relevant links back to the site. Something like results "powered by caloriesite.com" - and of course i'll seek their permission too.

Is this possible to do if I outsourced it? Seems pretty easy in theory but like I said, I'm not techy so it could be different in practice. Is it a very involved process or relatively simple?

Thanks a lot guys.

Always appreciated

Altug
#app #create #database #site
  • Profile picture of the author nthmarketing
    You could in a round about way by scraping the information. But really you can't unless they give you DB access.

    Fred
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  • Profile picture of the author ussher
    Yes its possible.

    Orca PHP Scripts - Camouflaged PHP/MySQL Web Applications

    the "Search" is the one you want.

    The purpose of the script is really for you to create a search engine on your own site, but there is no reason that you could not put the search details of the sites you like and spider their search results.

    When the search results are displayed the links will go to the sites that you have retrieved the information from so they should be happy too.

    If you were going to turn it into an actual wordpress plugin, then it might take a bit of extra time, but you dont need to inorder to use it. It has its own search control panel.

    If you did want to hire someone to do it, Id appreciate it if you would post it as a job on my site, earner.net (it feeds out to donanza.com the freelancer search engine so that should help find someone to do it.)

    I know it can be converted into a module, because i've done it before for Jamroom:
    Jamroom: Jamroom Marketplace
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  • Profile picture of the author Altug
    Thanks guys, appreciate the responses.

    It's not really links that these search results churn out. To be exact it's a calorie search engine where you input the name of a food and it returns results of the food (with variations) and how many calories it contains.

    For example, if you type "chicken" as your query it returns a list of foods such as "Chicken breast, cooked" or "Chicken thigh, with skin" etc etc and tells you how many calories it contains.

    Perhaps scraping would be the best option along with permission from whatever website it's coming from.

    Also I don't want to make a WP plugin or anything like that it's just for a page on my site.
    In essence all I need is the information from these databases to make my own (ethically of course). I guess I want to know how involved this process would be.

    Thanks again

    Altug
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    • Profile picture of the author wcardinal
      Try contacting one of the sites that provide the information already. They might be able to provide you some kind of private API that you can tap into. Don't contact the big guys - contact someone that has a relatively new but good-looking site. You can position it as free advertising for them.
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  • Profile picture of the author mahesh2010
    Hi,
    I have a idea can you link your search box with that of google search function.
    this would be better instead of building own data base containing list of website,instead we can link our website search engine to google that will do it for us ??
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    Mobile Website Design
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