On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial posted about building a link scraping script with the combination of PHP and cURL (the script pulls in a page, grabs all of the links off of it and follows them, etc).

I actually built this a few years ago because I had grandiose visions of becoming the next Google. Clearly, that did not happen, mostly because my localhost, database, and bandwidth are not infinite. Yet this little robot has quite interesting applications and uses if you really have the time to play with and fine-tune it.

You'll need to have cURL support built into your PHP installation to get the scripts working, but the actual code itself is pretty simple. Curl and XPath do most of the heavy lifting of finding and following the links and its easy enough to drop them into a MySQL table from there. You can download the source here.