Extracting Product Offers from e-Shop Websites

On-line retailers as well as e-shoppers are very interested in gathering product records from the Web in order to compare products and prices. The consumers compare products and prices to find the best price for a specific product or they want to identify alternatives for a product whereas the on-line retailers need to compare their offers with those of their competitors for being able to remain competitive. As there is a huge number and vast array of product offers in the Web the product data needs to be collected through an automated approach. The contribution of this papers is a novel approach for automatically identify and extract product records from arbitrary e-shop websites. The approach extends an existing technique which is called Tag Path Clustering for clustering similar HTML tag paths. The clustering mechanism is combined with a novel filtering mechanism for identifying the product records to be extracted within the websites.