Knowledge Agents on the Web

Abstract

This paper introduces and evaluates a new paradigm, called Knowledge Agents, that incorporates agent technology into the process of domainspecific Web search. An agent is situated between the user and a search engine. It specializes in a specific domain by extracting characteristic information from search results. Domains are thus user-defined and can be of any granularity and specialty. This information is saved in a knowledge base and used in future searches. Queries are refined by the agent based on its domain-specific knowledge and the refined queries are sent to general purpose search engines. The search results are ranked based on the agent’s domain specific knowledge, thus filtering out pages which match the query but are irrelevant to the domain. A topological search of the Web for additional relevant sites is conducted from a domain-specific perspective. The combination of a broad search of the entire Web with domain-specific textual and topological scoring of results, enables the knowledge agent to find the most relevant documents for a given query within a domain of interest. The knowledge acquired by the agent is continuously updated and persistently stored thus users can benefit from search results of others in common domains.