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How do price comparison websites gather there prices

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Jan 07.2010

Hi,
How do price comparison websites such as pricegrabber.co.uk gather price information from a variety of retailers. I am sure this is a simple question to most. Lack of experience I suppose : (

Do they use Xpath?

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6 Comments(s) ↴

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@chris22Jan 07.2010 — Just guessing, but I reckon they just crawl the web in the same way as Google and other search engines do, only looking for specific information (prices for goods/services).
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@pbdeveloperauthorJan 07.2010 — I dont know if they do though ... Or maybe they do?
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@jonmasterJan 08.2010 — Just do a google search how pricegrabber works..

someone would have penned an article
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@Stephen_PhilbinJan 08.2010 — It's just a guess, but I think they'd probably contact the retailers and request (pay for?) some sort of access to the retailers' networks and data. That way they can just automatically harvest all the data they need without having to process out 99.9% of the data which would be just unwanted HTML etc.
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@ruchiicooolJan 08.2010 — they use different types of calculation thats why al site have different data to show i hv seen new this type of site http://thenetinfo.com
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@geek78Jan 15.2010 — I have seen one site actually crawling other shopping sites. An example is:

http://www.onewayshopping.com

I am not sure about price grabber.
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