Project Detail

Description

I am an economics professor who is interested in hiring someone to write a program to scrape auction data from Swoopo.com . See http://www.swoopo.com/brw/ended-auctions_0.html?ast=3 for the data to be scraped. The scraping program would collect data from all of the 71,000+ completed auctions that appear to be available on the site. The data would be in an Excel file, with one line of data per auction. To make what I am saying more concrete, one of the 71,000+ ended auctions can be viewed at http://www.swoopo.com/auction/bossart-automatic-watch-cortez/197180.html . From this page, the line of data would contain the auction id (Auction ID: 197180), auction item (Bossart Automatic Watch Cortez), short description (The Cortez combines optical class and beauty with high functional demands.), end price ($12.12), auction winner (Kikekikon), auction end date and time (This auction ended on Jul-14-2009, at 06:59 PDT), savings (Savings: 92%), item value (Worth up to: $390.00 ), placed bids (Placed bids (26): $15.60 ), free bids (FreeBids (2): $0.00 ), final price (Final price: $12.12 ), savings (Savings: $362.28 ), final 10 bids ($12.12 Kikekikon SingleBid,$12.00 Jimar SingleBid,$11.88 Mcpokie SingleBid,$11.76 Jimar SingleBid,$11.64 Kikekikon SingleBid,$11.52 Jaglei SingleBid,$11.40 Kikekikon SingleBid,$11.28 Jimar SingleBid,$11.16 Mcpokie SingleBid,$11.04 Pazdl SingleBid), delivery cost (Delivery cost: $12.90), return policy (Return: Within 14 days in the original packaging), and URL (http://www.swoopo.com/auction/bossart-automatic-watch-cortez/197180.html). I've written web scraping programs myself in the past (using Lencom's Visual Web Task), but I'm hoping to get someone to write a more efficient program for gathering the data.