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Introduction<br />

Robots And The Web: An Electronic Shopp<strong>in</strong>g Agent<br />

Bassam Aoun<br />

IMAGE Technology Research Group<br />

Curt<strong>in</strong> University of Technology<br />

Perth, Western Australia<br />

Email: saounb@cc.curt<strong>in</strong>.edu.au<br />

Automated, autonomous brows<strong>in</strong>g has an <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>gly important task <strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong><strong>format</strong>ion discovery and assisted<br />

brows<strong>in</strong>g on the Internet. Where users could once keep up to date with <strong>in</strong><strong>format</strong>ion of <strong>in</strong>terest on the Internet,<br />

the exponential growth of the network has made this process <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>gly time consum<strong>in</strong>g and less reward<strong>in</strong>g.<br />

Automated brows<strong>in</strong>g can be performed by a number of software entities <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g agents, robots, <strong>in</strong>fobots,<br />

knowbots, wanderers, spiders, crawlers, worms and ants. The application of such programs <strong>in</strong>clude <strong>in</strong>dex<strong>in</strong>g,<br />

l<strong>in</strong>k/html validation, mirror<strong>in</strong>g, electronic commerce, monitor<strong>in</strong>g changes to resources and resource discovery.<br />

Barga<strong>in</strong>bot Shopp<strong>in</strong>g Agent<br />

Barga<strong>in</strong>bot [URL 1] is a Web-based electronic shopp<strong>in</strong>g agent that helps users search for particular product<br />

items on the Internet. Barga<strong>in</strong>bot is currently be<strong>in</strong>g trialled with onl<strong>in</strong>e bookstores. Barga<strong>in</strong>bot's multithreaded,<br />

multi-connection architecture facilitates simultaneous search<strong>in</strong>g of multiple bookstore databases on<br />

the Internet. Barga<strong>in</strong>bot filters and <strong>format</strong>s its f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs <strong>in</strong> a manner facilitat<strong>in</strong>g comparison shopp<strong>in</strong>g by the<br />

user. Figure 1 illustrates Barga<strong>in</strong>bot's Web front-end. Upon specify<strong>in</strong>g the title and/or author, the agent<br />

searches multiple bookstore databases and presents its f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs to the user. Returned results <strong>in</strong>clude the cost of<br />

the book and a hypertext l<strong>in</strong>k to the appropriate store where the user can purchase the book (Figure 2).

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