I've written a web crawler for a fortune 20 company, while I was in a research group at said company. I know exactly what would be involved. Storing prices with some small meta data is much much cheaper than storing full pages in the form of a search index. Scraping a discrete list of sites is far far easier and cheaper than writing a crawler robust enough to attempt to crawl arbitrary pages on the internet. Not only that, many retailers have APIs these days so a scraper wouldn't be needed for many of them, and reading from an API is something a novice programmer could do in less than an hour per retailer.
One of my close friends worked at pricegrabber for years, and the statement "all they do is create an index of online prices" is completely false.
Your continual use of ad hominem speaks volumes, and is your attempt to hide a lack of hard numbers.
> Your continual use of ad hominem speaks volumes, and is your attempt to hide a lack of hard numbers.
Questioning your reading skills you ignore given hard numbers that you've requested is perfectly reasonable. Questioning your math or economics skills when you insist that BPP and CPI are independent when you admit to not knowning how they are derived is perfectly reasonable. You might want to check what ad hominem actually means (beyond the latin translation), you might be enlightened. Alternatively, you can just ignore anything that contradicts your world view, as you have done before.
One of my close friends worked at pricegrabber for years, and the statement "all they do is create an index of online prices" is completely false.
Your continual use of ad hominem speaks volumes, and is your attempt to hide a lack of hard numbers.