AI on the Web AI on the Web is a very comprehensive site of pointers to other sites around the Web on Artificial Intelligence including Overview of AI, Intelligent Agents, Search and Game Playing, Logic and Knowledge Representation, Planning, Reasoning with Uncertainity, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Perception and Robotics, Philosophy and the Future and AI Programming. Ovum Most of those revenues are expected to be earned from agents acting as a catalyst for e-commerce, rather than from agents used in less overtly commercial applications. Personalized agents on Firefly can even scan information on the preferences of users with similar tastes and use this data to offer you refined suggestions for new material. Yahoo will employ agents in a similar fashion to help its users find interesting Web sites. There also are plans for Agents to provide software tools later this year for businesses seeking to maximize their brand and community building efforts on the Web, says Kamionek.
Agents can also help people collectively construct knowledge, shaped around their needs.
Let's face it, cruising the Internet for information is fun, but it can also be time-consuming. These agents are also a way of personalizing the information that you want without the need to constantly go to various Web sites to find it. One of the latest consumer-oriented and simple examples of an Intelligent Agent is a program called PointCast. The user instructs the program to seek out certain types of information. Tympani Development's NetAttache Pro, Version 2.50e is a great off-line browser that will help you get around Internet bottlenecks by searching and retrieving only those pages you are interested in.