I've been doing some researching, I've done a similar project in php, however vb will be different. From experience I know that the most vitle part of a data miner is its ability to connect to the web - I'm still unsure whether vb6 can actually grab data from the internet, I'm also unsure if it needs to be installed on a server for it to work. From the research I've done, I've found what looks like a very simple way to grab data from the net and put it into a string - the operator is named SendRequest(). I found it at http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?s=5b8d2ced56fada595326414b91d974ba&p=2514645#post2514645

however I've just tried it out and it doesn't seem to know what the operator is, it calls it an undefined function - which basically means that the operator SendRequest is not installed in its libary of commands - perhaps it needs to be installed on a sever or maybe a higher version of VB is required - I'll do some more research to see if I can findout anymore about the SendRequest command, will report back soon.