A Scalable Comparison-Shopping Agent for the World-Wide Web

The World-Wide-Web is less agent-friendly than we might hope. Most information on the Web is presented in loosely structured natural language text with no agent-readable semantics. HTML annotations structure the displayof Web pages,but provide virtually no insight into their content. Thus, the designersof intelligent Web agentsneed to addressthe following questions: (1) To what extent can an agent understand information published at Web sites? (2) Is the agent's understanding sufficient to provide genuinely useful assistanceto users? (3) Is site-specific hand-coding necessary,or can the agent automatically extract information from unfamiliar Web sites? (4) What aspects of the Web facilitate this competence? In this paper we investigate these issueswith a case study using ShopBot, a fully-implemented, domainindependent comparison-shopping agent. Given the home pages of several online stores, ShopBot autonomously learnshow to shopat thosevendors. After learning, it is able to speed...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: AGENTS
• Authors: Robert B. Doorenbos, Oren Etzioni, Daniel S. Weld
• Keywords: AGENTS 1997, PERMISSION OF ACM, Security Privacy, ShopBot, Web Sites