Hi guys I just need some advice on how easy or how difficult it is to write some sort of desktop software application that could connect to a website - extract search results from a mysql database - and display the results in the software application, without the user needing to visit the actual website.
you can make that program by making api calls however your ip address has to be allowed in the server so that you can do whatever you want
well there are many software like you need, if you search on Google Web Extractor, Web Scraper, Web Ripper, Web Grabber, Web Scraping you will find many software some of these are open source, and others you need to pay, but if you are going to build a desktop software try using JAVA or something like that...
If your MySQL db allows remote connections then it is fairly simple but you are going to have to have a username and password for the db in the application which is a security risk (you can minimise it by making the user only have Read Only permissions). An alternative would be to create and API for the site and then get the desktop to connect to the API, this is better for security and gives you greater control. If you make the site also use the API internally then if you ever change the search results you would only need to change it once and it could replicate across both desktop and web versions.