I launched Ziggles.com, a comparison shopping engine for books in 1999 from my dorm room at UCLA. It was written in Perl, and had as much style as Craigslist do

I launched Ziggles.com, a comparison shopping engine for books in 1999 from my dorm room at UCLA. It was written in Perl, and had as much style as Craigslist does. The scraper was one big jumble of regular expressions, but it worked well. There are much better tools out there for scraping, thankfully.