MY KINGDOM FOR AN AGENT? EVALUATION OF AUTONOMY, AN INTELLIGENT SEARCH AGENT FOR THE INTERNET

This paper presents an evaluation of a commercially available intelligent search agent for the Internet. Search robots and search engines can be of great help in finding information on the Internet, but their different features and sometimes their unfriendly interfaces can be confusing. Some expect that intelligent search agents could solve these problems. But most of these applications are not yet on the market, and the few that are: do they really perform? One of the few commercially available search agents is Autonomy, from Autonomy Corporation. Its concept is promising to professional users: the natural language processing of the query, the take‐over of repetitive jobs, an integrated interface for searching and managing information, and the sharing of knowledge with other users. The test in this article, however, reveals that the product is not yet ready to challenge the Internet search indexes which, in the test cases, perform better than Autonomy does with regard to recall and precision of information retrieval. Moreover, Autonomy does not give enough feedback to control the search action.