SOAP: social agents providing people with useful information

We describe how a system of communicating software agents can help people in finding useful information. The agents operate on the Web because it constitutes an almost universal source of information. Search engines on the Web provide information with high recall and tolerable precision, but they can only be as good as the queries asked. Agents can exploit and supplement search engines by providing information without being asked precise questions or without explicit questions at all. Agents can do that with little overhead for the users by exploiting bookmark collections as sources of self-descriptions on the Web, by recording queries, results, and assessments, and by sharing all this among anonymous users as well as groups of users known to each other.