Re: Smart Agent help

Paul Francis (francis@cactus.slab.ntt.jp)
Mon, 27 Nov 95 09:57:15 JST


>
> A am developing sites for numerous large associations. I want to provide a
> service to the members by which they can choose from selected topics..say
> mortgage interest rates..and a robot goes out and searches selected sites
> and provides either by e-mail a formated "newsletter" or return a
> "newsletter" in html.
>
> Any suggestions?

A number of people are working towards the ability to search
selected sites, though I haven't heard of anyone trying to
put the result in a newletter format.

Harvest allows the user to custom build his own database,
which is then locally accessed at search time.
(http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu/)

MetaCrawler, Silk, IBMinfoMarket, and no doubt many others
query multiple pre-configured search databases at search
time.
(http://metacrawler.cs.washington.edu:8080/home.html
http://services.bunyip.com:8000/products/silk/silk.html
http://www.infomkt.ibm.com/about.htm)

I'm looking forward to the day when two of these
"meta" search services point to each other and create
an infinite search loop....

PF

ps.
If you're going to the WWW conference in Boston, I'll
be chairing a BOF on distributed searching. Please see
http://rodem.slab.ntt.jp:8080/paulStuff/