How to Create a Web Spy with a PHP Crawler

Crawler, spider, bot, or whatever you want to call it, is a program that automatically gets and processes data from sites, for many uses. Google, for example, indexes and ranks pages automatically via powerful spiders, crawlers and bots. We have also link checkers, HTML validators, automated optimizations, and web spies. Yeah, web spies. This is what we will be doing now. Actually I don’t know if this is a common term, or if its ever been used before, but I think it perfectly describes this kind of application. The main goal here is to create a software that monitors the prices of your competitors so you can always be up to date with market changes. You might think “Well, it is useless to me. You know, I’m a freelancer, I don’t have to deal with this ‘price comparison’ thing.” Don’t worry, you are right. But you may have customers that have a lot of competitors they want to watch closely. So you can always offer this as a “plus” service (feel free to charge for it, I’ll be glad to know that), and learn a little about this process. Read full article at 1stwebdesigner.com site.