Exercise 14: Searching mechanisms, Virtual worlds and Cyberagents (1/2)

1. What is a spider? What does it do?

Wikipedia(2010) states that a spider is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms or Web spider, Web robot. This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses

2. Differentiate the various types of software agents.

Haag (2006) suggests that there are only four essential types of software agents:

• Buyer agents or shopping bots
• User or personal agents
• Monitoring-and-surveillance agents
• Data Mining agents

Buyer agents / shopping bots
Buyer agents travel around a network (i.e. the internet) retrieving information about goods and services. These agents, also known as ‘shopping bots’, work very efficiently for commodity products such as CDs, books, electronic components, and other one-size-fits-all products.

User agents / personal agents
User agents, or personal agents, are intelligent agents that take action on your behalf. In this category belong those intelligent agents that already perform, or will shortly perform, the following tasks:

• Check your e-mail, sort it according to the user’s order of preference, and alert you when important emails arrive.
• Play computer games as your opponent or patrol game areas for you.
• Assemble customized news reports for you.
• Find information for you on the subject of your choice.
• Fill out forms on the Web automatically for you, storing your information for future reference
• Scan Web pages looking for and highlighting text that constitutes the “important” part of the information there
• “Discuss” topics with you ranging from your deepest fears to sports
• Facilitate with online job search duties by scanning known job boards and sending the resume to opportunities who meet the desired criteria
• Profile synchronization across heterogeneous social networks

Monitoring-and-surveillance agents
Monitoring and Surveillance Agents are used to observe and report on equipment, usually computer systems. The agents may keep track of company inventory levels, observe competitors’ prices and relay them back to the company, watch stock manipulation by insider trading and rumors, etc.

Data mining agents
This agent uses information technology to find trends and patterns in an abundance of information from many different sources. The user can sort through this information in order to find whatever information they are seeking.

A data mining agent operates in a data warehouse discovering information. A ‘data warehouse’ brings together information from lots of different sources. “Data mining” is the process of looking through the data warehouse to find information that you can use to take action, such as ways to increase sales or keep customers who are considering defecting.

3. Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.

We can identify some activities in e-commerce by following software agents:
Buyer agents / shopping bots
Amazon.com is a good example of a shopping bot. The website will offer you a list of books that you might like to buy on the basis of what you’re buying now and what you have bought in the past.

User agents / personal agents
Yahoo.com is an example of a personal agent. The website will provide you a e-mail checking, computer games playing and information finding, etc.

Monitoring-and-surveillance agents
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has an agent that monitors inventory, planning, and scheduling equipment ordering to keep costs down, as well as food storage facilities. These agents usually monitor complex computer networks that can keep track of the configuration of each computer connected to the network.

Data mining agents
For example, the agent may detect a decline in the construction industry for an economy; based on this relayed information construction companies will be able to make intelligent decisions regarding the hiring/firing of employees or the purchase/lease of equipment in order to best suit their firm.

Reference:
Haag, S. 2006. Management Information Systems for the Information Age. Pages 224-228.

Wikipedia 2010, Web crawler, last modified 30 April 2010, viewed 9 May 2010,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

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