Autonomous collaborative web agents

With the amount of information on the Internet growing at a rapid rate, users are finding it increasingly difficult to locate relevant data in a timely and effortless fashion. All too often, search engines provide large amounts of information that do not meet the user's needs. As a result, important data can be missed as the user tries to narrow the search and hence reduce the number of successful hits. This paper describes the Personal Internet Interface (PII) system, which simplifies the process by using a preemptive approach to searching. The system consists of a set of cooperative agents that monitor the user's Internet browsing behaviour. This monitoring provides the search attributes that will enable PII to seek out the relevant information on its own.