All the input has been great. Plus I have the urge to actually write the thing now. I am thinking about going ahead with my idea for a "overlord" of types, I would like to be able to logon, see what pages are being looked at, start/stop any of the bots, and change discard links I dont want them to follow that they are coming up on.

I am thinkin about a 4 process system, the overlord, and 3 bots, I want to make them slow and smart, I don't really care if it takes them a day to get through 1000 pages, or even less.

My main concern is the response time for the searches.

What do you (all) recommend for the database? Remember I will not spend a bunch of $$$ for anything. I know how horrible MySQL is with over 500,000 of anything (ie rows in a table). I need more guidance with that portion.