grabbing information from a site, and displaying it on my site. Expert help!!

[pouncer]

What I want to do is let a user type in a search criteria in an edit box. e.g, stamps, coins or whatever

then i want to somehow connect to ebay and grab all prices of stamps on ebay, and their inormation and parse the data and display it on my own website.

anyone got any suggesstions ?

[jcbarr]

Go to eBay and look around. I'm pretty sure you can set something like that up with them if you enter into their partnership plan.

[pouncer]

set something up with them? huh?

i don't want to set anything up with them.
just asking about grabbing certain info off a site

[genericnumber1]

you can get a site's HTML with file_get_contents() but many sites really frown upon things like that.... such as google not wanting you to use their services for yours (http://www.google.com/permissions/guidelines.html) I dont know if ebay has things like that in place.

[jcbarr]

The problem is you aren't going to be able to pull "certain" stuff off their page, you might be able to use an RSS feed with them for certain areas, but you probably aren't going to be able to directly search eBay for all auctions on slippers and then display them all on your page. You can grab the contents of an HTML file, but you can't "hack" in to their server and database and do searches.

I'm not sure if they do or not, but they may offer some sort of search service that you can integrate in to your own site. That is what I meant by looking around and setting something up with them.

If you can figure out how eBay passes the variables to the search you may be able to just append them to the url and get the information that way.