Moving up the information food chain: deploying softbots on the world wide web

  • Authors:
  • Oren Etzioni

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

  • Venue:
  • AAAI'96 Proceedings of the thirteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

I view the World Wide Web as an information food chain (figure 1). The maze of pages and hyperlinks that comprise the Web are at the very bottom of the chain. The WebCrawlers and Alta Vistas of the world are information herbivores; they graze on Web pages and regurgitate them as searchable indices. Today, most Web users feed near the bottom of the information food chain, but the time is ripe to move up. Since 1991, we have been building information carnivores, which intelligently hunt and feast on herbivores in Unix (Etzioni, Lesh, & Segal 1993), on the Internet (Etzioni & Weld 1994), and on the Web (Doorenbos, Etzioni, & Weld 1996; Selberg & Etzioni 1995; Shakes, Langheinrich, & Etzioni 1996).