Abstract
The Internet and world wide web (WWW) have in recent years, grown exponentially in size and
in terms of the volume of information that is available on it. In order to effectively deal with
the huge amount of information on the web, so called web search engines have been developed
for the task of retrieving useful and relevant information for its users. Unfortunately, these web
search engines have not kept pace with the boom growth and commercialization of the web.
The main goal of this dissertation is the development of a model for a collaborative personalized
meta-search agent (COPEMSA) system for the WWW. This model will enable the personalization
of web search for users. Furthermore, the model aims to leverage on current search engines
on the web as well as enable collaboration between users of the search system for the purposes of
sharing useful resources between them. The model also employs the use of multiple intelligent
agents and web content mining techniques. This enables the model to autonomously retrieve
useful information for it’s user(s) and present this information in an effective manner.
In order to achieve the above stated, the COPEMSA model employs the use of multiple intelligent
agents. COPEMSA consists of five core components: a user agent, a query agent, a community
agent, a content mining agent and a directed web spider.
The user agent learns about the user in order to introduce personal preference into user queries.
The query agent is a scaled down meta-search engine with the task of submitting the personalized
queries it receives from the user agent to multiple search services on theWWW. The community
agent enables the search system to communicate and leverage on the search experiences of a
community of searchers. The content mining agent is responsible for analysis of the retrieved
results from theWWWand the presentation of these results to the system user. Finally, a directed
web spider is used by the content mining agent to retrieve the actual web pages it analyzes from
the WWW.
In this dissertation an additional model is also presented to deal with a specific problem all web
spidering software must deal with namely content and link encapsulation.
Prof. E.M. Ehlers