My boss has given me a list of around 3500 companies and wants the generic contact email for each of them by tomorrow. I know this sounds retarded, and it is, but our client is demanding it. The approach I'd like to take is this:

Carry out a google search for company name
Identify company website and redirect to it
Step through website links to find a contact us / about us page
Locate and return the first email address on the page

I've done a bit of python here and there, but nothing web based or with regex... though I get the basic ideas I don't know if I would be able to execute this in the next 12 hours.
If anyone has any help on how I could script this with python or ruby I would be very appreciative......
I would look to a more non-technical solution. You could split out the 3500 names and post them to Amazon Mechanical Turk as a HIT, paying 1 cent for each. Then instead writing code to scrape Google, you write code to create the hits and let real people do the "scraping" of the company websites.
Don't know if that will work for you but that's probably what I'd do.
Hope that helps!
Brandon
Extract company contact details from google