Agent Technology in Electronic Commerce and Information Retrieval on the Internet

Abstract

This paper describes BargainBot, a multi-threaded, multi-connection, autonomous search agent prototype equipped to reduce the complexities of navigating the rapidly growing number of online shops on the Web, and to assist users in locating specific product items. Different agent architectures will be discussed, and comparison is made to conventional software robots. The use of agent technology in electronic commerce and general information retrieval, as well as the future of agent technology on the Internet will also be discussed.

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