Schedule external sites for change to web page

[lrafferty]

Hi from a brand new user!
I use the Zoom on my CDs, and it is fast and accurate. My boss asked if I can use it to "spider" external web sites which display rates of our competitors' products. The goal is to have a mechanism that can detect a change in the rate so the sales agents do not have to track over 150 different sites each month to see if the rates changed. I read something about dates but could not be sure if spidering was dating the info as today's date or pulling the update date from the web page.

Any help?
L

[David]

You can index external sites. You can also sort the results by date. The problem might be that not all web pages return a valid last updated date. Many dynamic pages (those generated by a PHP, ASP or similar server side script) return today's date as the last updated date.

See also this old discussion about setting dates on HTML pages.