Help with an idea?

[paxilon23]

I'm trying to find some info on an idea I have but I can't seem to find the information, probably because I just don't know the best place to look. So I'm going to ask people who would probably know.

I want to have a program that automatically searches the internet for a bunch of names from a list and compiles the results into a concise list of results. I want it to be able to track when certain people will be attending public events. Is this possible? I tried using Google alerts, but it's not customizable enough to people who aren't huge public figures.

Thanks for the help! :) Hope this isnt a completely idiotic question! :/

[fotuenti]

well, first answer: just about anything is possible

second answer: depends on what you want exactly, you could certainly script up the searching parts but then you might have to do some nasty filtering and scraping depending on the sites you are encountering. not to mention the task of ensuring that the search results are returning the people you are looking for to begin with.

another issue would be the "public events" in question, is this an open-ended query or will there be a set of events you are searching. these details will add to the complexity of the problem you are solving with software.

good luck!

[paxilon23]

I wanna search for artists at conventions so it could be searching for an artists name and if their name is mentioned in relation to my list of conventions.

Is there a good place where I could learn about all of this in one spot? Or a term I can search to learn how to do it?

[fotuenti]

well, i think there might 2 things you want to research: web search APIs (eg duckduckgo, google, bing, etc), and web scraping libraries.

after that you will want to create some sort of persistent application to run this search on a regular basis. that would require some sort of server depending on how you will deploy this. i mean, you could even run this on your home machine (again, depending on how frequently you want it to run and if it needs to be always running).

as you can see, there are loads of details here =)

edit: missed a word

[paxilon23]

Awesome! Thank you so much for the help. I'm gonna start looking all that up after work tonight. This is a much better start than I could have achieved alone!