[plug] Best platform/language to setup a simple web scraper

[Michael Van Delft]

I’ve been using the reiwa website (and others) to look for houses. In
particular the apartments on 120~130 Terrace Road that sometimes come
up for < $400,000 but usually sell in a week or less. reiwa has a way
you can save advanced searches and setup email alerts. Unfortunately
when nothing matches your search, instead not sending an email or even
an email that says “No matches found today” it spams you with a bunch
of houses that have nothing to do with your search.

I thought I can fix this I’ll just setup a simple web scraping script
to do the job for me and I can have fun learning a new tool at the
same time. So far the three options that I am looking at are Yahoo
Pipes, Google App Engine and Scrapy/cron job on a Linode VPS I have.

I’ve never used any of those before so I’m looking for advice, is
there something else I should be looking at? Or is there any reason to
pick one of those methods over another? How would you approach this?

Regards,
Michael