I heard that there is this thing called "the cloud" where you can rent services based on the work time. That makes cheapo servers both realistic and quite simple ;)
Actually I just noticed you get 750h of free micro instance time from aws... I wonder if it would be worth doing. I imagine the link+tags are <100GB in total.
You can't write a simple scraper that is not distributed in 100 of machines across the web to pull out their data.