Abstract. This article talks about softbots - software robots, that help web-users find searched informations. To answer the user-queries and achieve the appropriate results, softbots are using simple, on Internet free available tools for searching informations, e.g. Yahoo! and AltaVista. The most simple, but most used softbot, which is discussed in this article, is Metacrawler - a softbot, which is constituting only a unified interface to various search-robots. More intelligent robots, e.g. AHOY! and Shopbot, prove choose a sequence of actions needed for achieving the goal. Also they can read and understand contents of unknown web-sites. This demonstrates new huge facilities of World Wide Web in the allday life.
Keywords: softbot, robot, WWW, searching
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology,
Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava
(c) Marek Discantiny, 17.11.98