AntCrawlers: Focused Crawling Agents Based on the Idea of Ants

In recent years, the researches on focused search engines have achieved a series of results. Such as, in focused search field, most researchers focus on how single agent to crawl on web. However, we propose a multi-agent system in this paper based on the idea of Ants. As natural ants communicate with pheromone to find food, our agents work with two kind of ldquopheromonerdquo to communicate with others, one is ldquofood pheromonerdquo denoting the values of importance of pages; the other is ldquovisits pheromonerdquo denoting the visits numbers of pages in recent time. The ldquofood pheromonerdquo value of a page is decided by the importance of itself and the pages it links to. We introduce the computational architecture of Ants, and explain the mechanism of communication and cooperation.