PageQuery Web Service

For further technical information, and password login access please e-mail enquiries@blln.net.

PageQuery Web Service is an accurate, high performance URL query system that allows you to automatically extract specific, or user defined, 'nuggets' of data from a web page (a.k.a. screen scraping). Any number of items can be configured into a system for extraction, and once they are, the Page Query Web Service will automatically detect their presence on any page across an entire domain.

Please note that we can setup and maintain any number of PageQuery Web Services for your business, or alternately, you can build your own turnkey solution by using the PageQuery Builder. Click here for more information.

Popular applications of this Web Service include price comparison systems and news feed aggregators. You can use PageQuery for any system that requires reliable and accurate detection and extraction of speicific web page content.

Figure 1 - Example of the PageQuery Web Service in action as it gathers pertinent data
related to what an internet user is viewing on a web page and delivers this to a SurfAssist style product.

How PageQuery Web Service can help your businesses:

• Research and Marketing companies - It is highly important for research and marketing companies to gather relevant and reliable data for their customers. PageQuery Web Service will ensure that the web data collected will be highly pertinent resulting in much higher quality offerings to their customers.
  
  
• Advertising and Media companies - As PageQuery Web Service gathers highly pertinent data, these companies will be able to display highly relevant ads onto a web page based on what the internet user is viewing. This will result in an improved CPC (cost per click) revenue as there is a higher chance of ad clicks.
  
  
• Price comparison sites - This sector is currently very competitive with sites looking for a way to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors. PageQuery Web Service (along with SurfAssist) can inform you what your customers / members are viewing on a competitor's site. With this data your business can tailor offerings or promotional messages to attract your customers / members back to your site.
  The PageQuery Web Service can also assist price comparison sites when sorting through data feeds from their affiliated / partner merchants. This will ensure that data collected is clean and will make the technical personnels' work easier when sorting through data.
  
  
• Online Retail sites - PageQuery Web Service can be used to inform your sites what your customers / members are viewing on competitive sites. With this data, your business can decide the best way to attract back your customers / members.

Technical Overview

PageQuery Web Service is an accurate, high performance system that enables other applications to execute queries against any web page within a 'hard coded' domain. A 'hard coded' domain means that PageQuery Web Service can use a set of pre-configured domain 'rules' in order to extract specific pieces of information within any web page in a particular domain. These rules are created using the PageQuery Builder application and stored as Regular Expressions.

The PageQuery Web Service returns page data in the form of an open standards, XML dataset.

PageQuery Web Service is a Microsoft ASP.NET Web Service running on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 that uses a Microsoft SQL 2000 database to access its rules.