Intelligent Agents for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Creating and Using Automatic Software to Make Life Easier"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

Intelligent agents are software programs which act on their own to perform the tasks they are programmed to accomplish. Intelligent agents may be referred to as bots.

The most common intelligent agents active today are probably search engine "spiders." Search engines (as opposed to directories such as Yahoo!) actively search the Internet to find, scan and record the content. This is accomplished through the use of programs that act basically like you do - they browse the Net for content. The main different is that since these spider programs don't care what anything looks like, they don't render the HTML instructions.

These spiders may note the HTML tags that they are programmed to look for, for the search engines to decide what the page is about. For instance, the <H1> tag indicates the most important headline, so the words within that tag are probably more important and indicative of the page's content than the words between the fifth paragraph "<p>" tag.

The next most active intelligent agents online are -- unfortunately -- spammer programs that seek out publicly available email addresses

These programs are much like search engine spiders in that they browse the web at great speed, but the only content they are looking for are email addresses. I get a ton of spam at all my publicly available email addresses because of this.

Some of the most important intelligent agents for consumers wishing to save money are shopping bots and auction bots. There are sites where you can put in that you are looking for a particular item for sale. A shopping bot will look for that item and its price on certain shopping center-type sites. It will display the results, enabling you to find the cheapest price to the penny. What kind of customer service you'll get in something we can't expect these bots to find.

Maybe you're looking for an item that it not for sale in any retail stores but which may be on auction on eBay or on some of its many competitors and imitators. You tell an auction bot you are looking for a 1964 Barbie Doll or an issue #10 SPIDERMAN and an intelligent agents searches eBay and other auction sites. It displays the results, whether any at all are currently for sale, how old the auctions are and the current bids.

As people get used to having constant broadband connections and to using their computers to accomplish many more tasks, including saving them money, we're going to use intelligent agents much more in our lives.

Next: iPaq Pocket PC

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