11/96 Features: The Search Is On (Agents)
Not-So-Secret Agents
BY THE end of 1997, going to the Internet's data mountain to drill for information may seem quaintly old-fashioned. It's easier to make the best pieces of that mountain come to you as a personalized information resource.
Internet information delivery tools are one of the fastest-growing categories in the computer industry, according to research by the Gartner Group. These tools' methods may vary, but they all have a single aim: relieving you of the tedium of visiting site after site to select information manually.
Many of these tools dispatch personal agents, or spiders, to wander the Internet and collect documents. It's an old trick with a new twist. Iconovex's EchoSearch, for instance, lets you query multiple search engines simultaneously. A shareware spider, Teleport Pro (formerly Internet Marauder 95), lets Windows 95 users build their own meta search tools and avoid irrelevant documents. Quarterdeck's WebCompass does a similar job, letting you fine-tune connections to selected engines.
Due to hit store shelves in January, AutoNomy Web Researcher actually learns from each search. It will perform background searches of the Internet based on your natural-language queries. The program builds a separate agent for each query and continually refines it, based on documents you choose as most relevant. Eventually you'll be able to include other resources, such as e-mail or hard drives, in the search. A second tool, AutoNomy Press Agent, can create a personalized newspaper from online newswires, magazines and newspapers.
Tierra's Highlights lets you grab the latest from your favorite Web sites and stroll through keyword-filtered information offline. Others, such as PointCast Network, Empirical Media's WiseWire and Individual's FreeLoader, build customized newspapers from a variety of resources.
With all of these trained spiders crawling around in cyberspace, there's a danger of network overload. A growing number of companies are moving sophisticated search services onto their intranets, where they can control not only the access but the quality of retrieved information. Fulcrum Technologies and Verity offer add-ons to their search engines that let network administrators build agents for frequently performed queries, saving users the trouble of creating their own.