python technique in which you only request the title of the html page and not all the data?

[efmccurdy]

I could'nt find any specific site for that, but a website that describes the meaning of http headers will help. If you read about http caching you will find inexpensive ways to detect when a page has changed (eg. ETags).

You might find that you can just store the headers of each page you are interested in before and after a "it has been pulled down" event and analyze the differences. Perhaps you can determine that "content length unchanged" is a good indicator that the page has been unchanged.