An "intelligent agent" is defined as a "…self-sufficient piece of code that can make decisions without human intervention…." (Millman, 1998). In addition, it has the ability to adapt itself and become more efficient and effective as it is utilized. As such it represents a business application of "artificial intelligence" technology (Radosevich, 1998).
The Internet has become a global network of information that consists of computing devices of all sizes and types, owned and/or managed by a plethora of organizations. Since its inception in the early 1990s, it has experienced phenomenal growth. As a result it has become a very large storehouse of information. The search engine, "Google" claims to index over 1.3 billion web pages ("Intelligent Agents," 2001).
While the Internet has literally shrank the world into a much smaller space and has facilitated the way that businesses and/or people communicate, it has created another problem—information overload. Today, trying to find specific information on "The Web" is a function of how well the user had devise his or her query.
A large number of search engines exist providing indexes of a large number of web pages, considerable skill is still required to frame the query and retrieve that information which is useful and eliminate that which is not. Creative web designers to enable the biasing their content to appear more frequently in searches can technically skew the output of search engines. There are even services available such as "Go To" (www.overture.com) that will permit web site owners to purchase "positions" in search engine results ("Intelligent Agents," 2001).
Problem Resolution via Intelligent Agents
In spite of the best intentions of the Internet, it has become populated with misleading references, broken links, and typically, far too many hits on most user queries (Millman, 1998). Consequently, the "experience" for most users doin
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