A spider, also known as crawler, robot, traverses the World Wide Web in an orderly manner. Search engines line Google uses this technology to provide up-to-date search results. The spider downloads the pages from the web, keeps a copy of the pages that is later indexed to provide quicker search.
Spiders can also perform automated maintenance tasks like link validating. It can also retrieve specific information from web pages, like the email addresses.
Using some search engine technology like the FAST search engine, we can specify the web sites to crawl. This allows for creating custom search engines that filters results by the particular web sites, typically a certain type of websites (for example, all Australian news websites).
2) Differentiate the various types of software agents:
The following are the different types of software agents:
a) Collaborative Agents: Collaborative Agents can act rationally and autonomously in open and time-constrained multi-agent environments.
b) Interface Agents: Interface agents support and provide assistance, typically to a user learning to use a particular software. The agent tracks the user using the software and suggests better ways to perform the task as needed.
c) Mobile Agents: Mobile agents are software processes capable of roaming the WWW, interacting with foreign hosts, gathering information on behalf of its owner and retrieve data and complete tasks set by the user.
d) Information/Internet Agents: Information agents have come about because of the sheer demand for tools to help us manage the explosive growth of information and it can traverse the WWW.
e) Reactive Software Agents: Reactive agents is a special category of agents which do not possess internal, symbolic models of their environments. Instead they respond in a stimulus-response manner depending on the state of the system where they are embedded.
f) Hybrid Agents: Hybrid Agents are created based to combat the disadvantages of the five other software agents.
g) Heterogeneous Agent Systems: Heterogeneous agent systems refers to an integrated set-up of at least two or more agents which belong to two or more different agent classes. A heterogeneous agent system may also contain one or more hybrid agents.
http://agents.umbc.edu/introduction/ao/5.shtml
3) Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use:
Examples include:
- News sites that collect news from various websites and displays it as one.
- Credit card comparison sites that compares various credit cards and give results with best rates, personal loans, etc.
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