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The World Wide Web has become an invaluable information resource but the explosion of information available via the web has made web search a time consuming and complex process. Index-based search engines, such as AltaVista or Infoseek help, but they are not enough. This paper describes the rationale, architecture, and implementation of a next generation information gathering system -- a system that integrates several areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research under a single umbrella. Our solution to the information explosion is an information gathering agent, BIG, that plans to gather information to support a decision process, reasons about the resource trade-offs of different possible gathering approaches, extracts information from both unstructured and structured documents, and uses the extracted information to refine its search and processing activities.