I want to be able to programmatically (without it displaying in the browser) send an URL such as http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=platypi&sprefix=platypi%2Caps&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aplatypi" and get back in a string (or some more appropriate data type?) the html results of the page (the interesting part, anyway) so that I could parse that and reformat selected parts of it as matched text and images (which link to the appropriate page). I want to do this with Razor/Web Pages, if that makes any difference.
IOW, this is sort of a screen-scraping question, but really a "behind-the-screen" scraping.
Is it possible? How? A 100 point post-answer-bonus will be awarded to the (or the most helpful) answer.
Use the WebClient class (or .Net 4.5's better HttpClient class) to download the HTML, then use HTML AgilityPack to parse it