Web searching agents, what are they doing out there?

The Web has become a worldwide repository of information, which individuals, companies, and organizations utilize to solve or address various information problems. Many of these Web users utilize automated agents to gather this information for them. It is assumed that this approach represents a more sophisticated method of searching. However, there is little research investigating how Web agents search for online information. In this research, we examine how agents search for information on Web search engines, including the session, query, term, duration and frequency of interactions. For this study, we analyzed queries that 2,717 agents submitted to the Alta Vista search engine on 8 September 2002. Findings include: (1) agents interacting with Web search engines use queries comparable to human searchers, (2) Web agents are searching for a relatively limited variety of information, with only 18% of the terms used being unique, and (3) agent-Web search engine interaction typically spans several hours with multiple instances of interaction per second.