Alright, here's the scenario:

There's a certain website with a searchable database. It's a huge, industry database used by many sites all over Canada, so they're used to other sites using them.

We want to offer our users the ability to fill out their search criteria on *our* site, and then have our script search the other site once per day, and email the results back to the client.

Is this possible? Would we need to get cooperation from the other site or is there another way? Their site does not currently offer the user email notification and regular updates, so that's what we want to do.

*note: In case anyone's worried or wondering, we're not looking to steal the information from the other site... it would be quite clear where it is coming from and we'd give all credit. We just want to offer a higher level of useability than they currently do.

The first thing to figure out would be if you would have to submit your search terms through their web interface (e.g. you pass data to their web form) or if you can query the database directly.

Essentially, what you are talking about is what can be described by the nebulous term: Web Services. I think you would definitely want to contact them to see if they have any sort of Web Services API available to use. That would you give some structure to build your functionality on top of.

If you can only pass data to their form, your functionality on top of that would be a little more limited, but not impossible. You would need to setup some "cron" jobs to run the script weekly or daily or what have you. Then, you would have to check the results of the query to determine if the email should be sent.

No matter what way you decide to do it, I think you would have to or should have to get the other site's permission to do what you want to do. Plus, the more you work with them, the more they might make it easier for you to provide your users better features.

Yeah, that's what I've been thinking. The problem would be if they said, "thanks for the great idea" and took off with it, leaving us in the dust. And I guess that would be their prerogative since it's their site, but we're hoping for something better. :P

If I were simply passing data to their form through a querystring, how would I analyze the results, if it passes the results to their page and not ours?

If there's no good (and ethical) way to do this without their cooperation, we might just have to risk it and call them up. :)

That's where the cooperation of them would come in handy

Unfortunately, I think you make a good point in that you wouldn't have a good way to analyze the results, thereby negating the value of the service you want to provide. That's where the beauty and power of a Web Services API comes into play. It allows you to query and analyze in multitudes of ways.

If the site is really big, and they do stuff similar to this quite a bit, they may have something in place. Maybe there is something on their site about using their data.

Ask them, but don't give them details on the project. Tell them you need a way to get info from the database, and you'd rather not waste their bandwidth by querying the web site directly. Also tell them you will give due credit.

They may want you to pay...

It is possible to parse their results page and use the data. It's not easy though.