If you’ve ever researched topics online, you’ve no doubt found the need to open multiple web browsers, each loaded with a different resource. The practice of viewing more than one web page at once has become so common that all major browsers now support tabs that allow surfers to easily view multiple websites at once. Another approach to simultaneously viewing more than one website is to consolidate information with an aggregation webbot.

People are doing some pretty cool things with aggregation scripts these days. To whet your appetite for what’s possible with an aggregation webbot, look at the web page found at http://www.housingmaps.com. This bot combines real estate listings from http://www.craigslist.org with Google Maps. The results are maps that plot the locations and descriptions of homes for sale, as shown in Figure 12-1.