SO, an interesting Web tool that caught my attention is YOTIFY, (first part of name pronounced like Yoda, from Star Wars) at yotigy.com. The YouTube demo is provided below.

Have you ever wanted a bot to crawl the web to find something you wanted more info on, but you did not want to do the programming or spend too much time to pull it off? Well, this could be the cool tool for you. Yotify is easy to configure and use. Select the search category and keywords to create a scout (bot), and then turn it loose. It will send you feedback either hourly or daily, as a digest of results to your email account. This can be great for more than just e-shopping. I have set it up to scan for articles in artificial intelligence, which relates to my research project. I will let you know how it fares after several days activity.

This could be the next best thing to having an army of minions.