AI and navigation on the Internet and Intranet

Recent research has focused on using AI to harness the World Wide Web. Although intelligent agents are one of the most visible uses of AI on the WWW, substantial hype surrounds such usage. Oren Etzioni and Daniel Weld (1995) analyze the fact, fiction, and forecast of intelligent agents on the WWW and distinguish between the hype and the reality. The analysis summarizes some of the work discussed and demonstrated at the Fall Symposium on AI Applications in Knowledge Navigation and Retrieval, sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. In addition, the analysis investigates subsequent and related research in this rapidly changing field. Finally, I investigate some of the implications of these recent developments and isolate some gaps in the current research. I give particular attention to the impact of such systems on issues such as privacy and electronic commerce.