Spidering the web for information

I have a requirement to find restaurants that serve a paticular dish. I was thinking about making this a little programming exercise but am not completely comfortable where to start or what's legal etc.

I suppose utilmatly what I would like to do is spider through the internet collecting webpages which looked relivant and then proccess them further somehow.

I have some programming experience with Java and I have a book called 'Perl & LWP' on my bookshelf which I know covers writing web spiders.

Has anyone done anything simular in the past? My other thought was google hacking to make my manual searches yeild better results.

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Comments

NovaHax

Nothing illegal about spidering the web. Get to it man.

paul78

Have fun with the project. There's a cool little company that made a nice business at it too. you may have heard of it - Google

wes allen

You should look at Python - there are several really good modules for doing this stuff. Or, get an API key from google and plug into them directly.

aueddonline

wes allen wrote: »

You should look at Python - there are several really good modules for doing this stuff. Or, get an API key from google and plug into them directly.

I hadn't come accross this API key before, sounds quite cool. I also found this Heritrix here https://webarchive.jira.com/wiki/display/Heritrix/Heritrix;jsessionid=8ECB7A148E458F323231D03868F8C6E4 and got it crawling yesterday. I need to spend a bit more time with it to see if it'll do what I want.