Abstract

This paper describes the Lycos and WebAnts project projects at the Center for Machine Translation (CMT) at Carnegie Mellon University.

Lycos is an experiment in best-first-search within the space of documents formed by the Web.

WebAnts is an experiment in distributing the information collection task to a number of cooperating processors.

We also discuss directions for future agents that act as proxies for people who will soon be too busy to answer their email.