TechDose.com has this new tutorial today about the use of PHP to to parse basic eBay search results.

This tutorial is meant to explain a basic way to parse eBay's search results to retrieve a page of auctions. This script may soon be depreciated as eBay is constantly changing how its search results are displayed to prevent such parsing of their pages, but techniques used in this tutorial could be carried over to other applications. This script does not use eBay's API, but rather it "scrapes" the content off of eBay's website (ie. window scraping).

While it might be the cheaper way to go, "screen scraping" like this can lead to a few issues for your pages - not the least of which that most sites just don't appreciate it. Also, if one thing changes on the page and you were keying off of it, your whole application could need to be redesigned. But, for those that are really looking for a simple alternative to the eBay API, this might just be your article...