A piece of software, run in the background or at low CPU usage, that crawls sites looking for a wanted item or items. The items would have to stated, in search words, as accurately as possible with an optional price range. Depending on how impatient you maybe, you can also control the period between the search times.
The graphic would be a Huntsman traversing various terrains until a tasty morsel is caught and all packaged up.
So, now you too can reclaim that old teddy hug or that reignited spark from that ancient tech.-- wjt, Jan 30 2015 Rare steak rare_20steak [normzone, Jan 30 2015] If I set this to old teddy hug it will generate millions of hits, not very helpfull. Should be able to search on picture also. +-- zeno, Jan 30 2015 When a thing is not found with a human powered search, is it a lack of time spent searching or a lack of creativity as regards search terms. The robot will not be more creative than the human. Also, failure to find an object might be a failure of the searcher to realize or recognize how it is represented. As one broadens categories or criteria for your object, one risks identifying things that are similar but not the same as your desired object. The Huntsman will not know the difference, and will bring home something caught and packaged up but will be disappointed when you scream and recoil on unpackaging it.-- bungston, Jan 31 2015 It's not really search accuracy thats important but the constant repetition of searching to catch that rarity surfacing in the sales. [zeno] Though, with any search on the web, the words used, very much define your success. A picture would be great if you were running a deep analytics on your mini beowulf cluster.
I was thinking rare spider could lay web by placing wanted ads on swap/buy sites but because rarity is the variable, I think the weight would be on the owner selling rather than someone searching their forgotten, tucked away stuff.
[bungston] The Huntsman, would only be the screen saver, to indicate a potential buy. I wouldn't have rare spider buy the item.-- wjt, Jan 31 2015 random, halfbakery