Hi All

Excuse me if this is a stupid question to ask, but wondering if any one can help me in letting me know the details of how to develop a price comparision engine. I guess the engine works like a Screen Scraper(?). Many sites these days provide this functionality (Expedia, Kelkoo etc) to compare everything from Flight Prices to CDs etc.

I want to know fundamentals of this design. Also how can we extract the information from Company A, B, C and D to compare the prices? Do they have to publish information with me so that I can search the info using webservices?

Thanks a lot
Madhu

The travel-related sites (like Expedia and Travelocity) make use of the same Sabre software used by travel agents. I believe many of the other comparison sites make use of some kind of price sharing software with their business partners.

It would be a nightmare to try and derive this information from screen-scraping; commercial sites changes their page formats regularly.