Agents. Get used to using these: they are going to be popular. An agent is a piece of software into which you type in a request such as I want to know who makes chintz drapes in the Philadelphia area and goes out looking for suitable sites on the Web. What makes them particularly necessary is the growth of small Internet businesses. One of the mainstays of the Web, especially when electronic commerce takes off, will be that everyone and anyone can advertise their services to a world-wide audience. With, for instance, several million caterers in the world, trawling them all is as daunting a task as you can find. At present, the best way is to enter a set of search criteria into one of the search engines: Alta Vista, Yahoo, Magellan… a nd hope that the pages will have the right words for you to find. What agents do is compare the context of your request with the context of the pages they find. One such is from a small UK start-up called Autonomy Plc, which has a free beta version of its agent at www.agentware.com. Aimed at low-power users who want a simple interface, it embodies agents in the form of cartoon dogs that can be trained and sent off to bring back the right information. For our test, we tried a simple search: low budget film making. When you send the loyal hound out on a mission, the user interface shows a visual view of the Web as it finds it. Settings are available for varying levels of curiosity – the depth searched in a single site – and activity – the breadth of sites visited. Our search came up with some interesting accounts of low budget filmmakers including a diary of one now in production. Inexplicably, a couple of Apple Computer Inc sites caught our agent’s fancy as well as several Microsoft Corp ones.
Barking up the wrong tree
It would be a nice scoop for us journalists to find that Microsoft was funding small films, but when the hound started returning expensive film sites from Paramount, we knew it was barking up the wrong tree. A big down-side to the use of Autonomy is that it uses resources like crazy. On a 80486/33 with 16Mb RAM it is nearly impossible to work while the software is running. This highlights the current problem with agents, as opposed to search engines: agents have to operate in real time, whereas the latter have pre-indexed catalogs of sites collected at the central server’s leisure. An obvious solution is to let it roam overnight or over the weekend. However, when we tried that, it crashed out gracelessly. Connecting to the Internet overnight is a luxury afforded only to those with dedicated lines. So Autonomy plans partnerships with Internet service providers to provide ‘kennels’ where agents can reside when the user is logged off. Also planned are party agents, mail agents that can sift the rubbish electronic mail from the useful, and dating agents which can (allegedly) find your perfect partner across the world. In Spike Lee’s first film, She’s Gotta Have It, the heroine claims there is only one person on earth for each of us – if that is true, an agent is surely a girl’s best friend. In a World Wide world, it doesn’t sort out the travel, but I guess that’s just another feature waiting to be built in. Perhaps of more interest is the reality of the much-touted ‘personal newspaper’ – say what subjects you like, how your paper should look and what time you want it, and it finds the stories and drops them on your cyber-doorstep. As an idea, it is extremely plausible but almost worthless as a reliable method of findi ng information you need. That said, it is still a beta version so that’s OK. Download now, put a note in your diary to get it when it is finished; it is definitely worth a play.
