

How do you get blurbs from a website? - amrithk

When you type in a URL on websites like Facebook and Digg, they automatically pull up a blurb of the website that contains the first few sentances of the site.<p>For example, when typing in cnn.com, the CNN blurb "Breaking news U.S., World, Weather, Entertainment &#38; Video News" and the first few sentances on the CNN website automatically appear as well.<p>How is this done? Is there some sort of crawler that goes to the link provided? Thanks all.
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I believe what you're talking about is the title of the website.

From www.cnn.com

<html lang="en"><head><title>CNN.com - Breaking News, U.S., World, Weather,
Entertainment & Video News</title>

So you could just parse our the title of each site and display that.

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amrithk
How can I access this title automatically in the first place? Are you familiar
with any PHP solutions in particular?

Thanks again

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epi0Bauqu
Yes, that is the work of crawling and parsing. On some sites, they are human
edited as well.

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amrithk
Any resources on how to do this?

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epi0Bauqu
Well, I am doing this myself at the moment. I use LWP in Perl to crawl. As for
generating the description, it depends on what you want to do. You can use
combinations of the title and meta tags, or if it is just major sites you
want, try to grab a (at least partially) human edited form like from Alexa.

What is the application?

