Netoracle, an intelligent information agent

Abstract

Searching the World Wide Web today is comparable to giving a librarian a list of words and expecting him to find a set of documents that exactly answer your request. Because so little information is supplied, the librarian can only return partially satisfactory results. For example, some returned documents might be irrelevant or not enough relevant documents are found. There is no easy solution to producing a concise, valuable response to a query due to the enormous amount of information on the Web combined with the lack of homogeneity among Web pages. This thesis addresses this problem and provides a prototype of a search tool that exhibits some intelligent behavior. A number of improvements to the current state of the art in search engines are suggested.