CONCLUSION

The amount of information potentially available from the World Wide Web (WWW), including such areas as web pages, page links, accessible documents, and databases, continues to increase. This information abundance increases the complexity of searching and locating relevant information for users. This chapter suggests intelligent agents as a way to improve the performance of search and retrieval engines. The use of search engines, the i-agent, evolutionary computing, and fuzzy logic has been shown to be an effective way of filtering data and information retrieval from the World Wide Web.

In this research, an intelligent agent was first constructed to assist in better information filtering, information gathering, and ranking from the World Wide Web than simply using existing search engines. Simulation results show that the performance of the system using the intelligent agent provides better results than conventional search engines. It is not very surprising since agents use the results of search engines and then filter the irrelevant web pages. In most of the simulated cases, the combination of evolutionary computing, fuzzy logic, and i-agents in filtering data and information provided improved results over traditional search engines. This research is unique in the way the agents are constructed and in the way evolutionary computing and fuzzy logic are incorporated to help users. The method described in this chapter demonstrates that using i-agents, evolutionary computing, and fuzzy logic together has a great deal of promise. In particular, the method employed shows that it can:

• collect and rank relevant web pages;

• reduce the size of the result set and recommend the more relevant web pages according to a given query;

• increase the precision of the results by displaying the URLs of relevant web pages.

The methods employed and described here require further study. The first study that is being looked at is directed at individuals. This includes having more volunteers to test and compare the methods . Given the information that these volunteers obtain, evaluate the value of the resulting information. Then, compare the results among the individuals. The second study that is being looked at is for business competitiveness . This study employs the methods described in this chapter and evaluates the information that a business needs in its industry to maintain a watch on its current and new competitors .