Sites LIke Kelkoo-How Do They work?

[Benny Brando]

How do price comparison sites like Kelkoo work? There hardly ever seems to be a broken link or a price that doesn't match what they say it is when you click on it.

I also include sites like IAFD and Adult DVD Talk with that.

How do they do it as there's no way somebody is going to manually check each page to make sure the product is still available and the price is correct so what type of software or code do they use?

Can anyone enlighten me as I've always been curious about this?

[Benny Brando]

Bump.........

[Cenobitez]

Bots my goodman.

they have robots carry out searches to check, but alot of the time, the seller provides a list to them or they have a web service running to provide it.

[Jacques]

Web Ferrets - each morning they pack their lunchbox (usually a peanut butter sandwich or two, an apple, a blue ribbon waffer bar and a packet of Seabrook crisps) and clock in at the Web Ferret Data Center on the A38 just outside of Derby.

Here they run up and down all the internet lines and collect the information for kelkoo.

You may have noticed sometimes that the web comes to a crawl? This is when the Web Ferrets are on a tea-break (milk and two sugars) or there is a change of shift.




Actually they use 'spiders' to harvest information (works like google searching a site), they then throw it all in a database, process it and then output it online. There is no way they can do it manually.

[Benny Brando]

Ok I see now. I always wondered how they did but stands to reason once you both explained it.

Thanks to you both.

PS. Ferrets? What are you like.