The use of web scraping in computer parts and assembly price comparison

摘要

If originally computers were used only as a tool to perform some calculations, nowadays computers has a lot of functions to help people finish their tasks in almost every aspect of human life. As a lot of various functions computers have, they also need different specifications for each computer so they can do their tasks according to their functionalities. Therefore this application was build with a purpose to recommend a solution to its users in assembling computes suited to their needs. This application also has a price comparison feature based on data sources retrieved from five computer shops so the users can save the costs of purchasing PC parts and assembling the computer easier. This comparison feature is based on a basic consumer's principal which are basically they wanting to buy items not only with the lowest price but also expect the best quality as possible. The research starts with the deployment of questionnaires to some respondents who had bought computer parts or assembled a computer online. This questionnaire is made to assure that all features which previously has been specified by the author is appropriate to user needs. Then, in order to obtain required data from five computer shops, the author use Pentaho Software as a tool to do web scraping and web grabbing method. These methods allow the application to obtain data from those five computer shops. The result of this research is a web-based application built in PHP and javascript with MySQL as its database.