Writing Intelligent Web Agents
By Michael Schrenk
Browser Creator Predicts Its Demise. Back in the mid-1990s I attended a panel discussion where Marc Andreessen, the cofounder and then chief technology officer of Netscape, was asked for his predictions of where the World Wide Web was headed. He predicted, to a surprised crowd, that the days of the browser, as the primary means of viewing the Internet, were numbered.
Andreessen continued, "That's why it's called Netscape Communications, and not Netscape Browser Company." He was referring to the fact that a Web browser is a general-purpose Web agent. And while they do a fine job of displaying Web pages, browsers do a poor job of identifying relevant information. Plus, their sheer size makes them impractical for use on anything other than a computer. He foresaw the browser's dominance threatened by Web agents running on appliances that perform specific tasks like playing online radio stations, providing email services, or allowing low-cost long distance Internet phone calls.
Today, due to the bandwidth limitations of wireless networks, portable devices depend heavily on special Web clients and intelligent agents. The Palm VII, for example, speeds Web surfing by employing special filtering agents in proxy servers, which work in concert with the Web client, to preserve bandwidth.
The new Web agents are important tools because they facilitate new uses for the Internet. For example, you can use a Web agent on a cell phone to see if your flight is on time while you're sitting in the back of a cab. Try doing that with a standard browser!
Today many agents are tied to servers and accessible through Web sites.
