Beginner - How would you automate a daily search of auction listings?
I have zero experience with scraping, proxies or programming in general, so I genuinely don't know what the right approach is. I'm not asking anyone to build this for me, I just want to understand what a realistic path looks like.
My goal is that there are a handful of online auction portals selling used industrial machinery. I'd like something that goes through them every day and checks all the listings, and then notifies me only when it finds a machine tool matching a few broad criteria. Things like any CNC lathe under 10 years old, or any 5-axis machining center under 10 years old. So it's not a daily digest I'm after, the scraping runs daily, but I only want to hear about it when there's an actual match, and I don't want to be told twice about a listing I've already seen.
The listings are often messy, the year of manufacture is usually buried in a free-text description, model naming is wildly inconsistent, and the site categories are unreliable, so anything based on exact keywords isn't enough.
Two constraints are that I can't keep a machine running 24/7, and I want it based on reading the sites directly, not on the portals' own alerts or filters, which are too poor for what I need. I already pay for a Claude subscription, in case that's relevant.
How would you go about this? What should I be learning, what would you use, and any guides worth the time? Happy to share the exact portals if that makes the answers more concrete. And if there's an obvious "don't do it this way", I'd rather hear it now.
Thanks.