An intelligent internet search agent based on genetic algorithms

Searching the World Wide Web sites is one of the most common tasks performed, and Internet and Intranet searching has become one of the hottest topics. It is also one of the most frustrating tasks. In fact, the situation has become a notorious symbol of the Web's growing size and lack of structure, as well as the inadequacy of Web search technologies. While the Web offers an incredibly rich base of information, organized as a hypertext, it does not provide a uniform and efficient way to retrieve specific information based on user-defined search criteria. In this thesis, an intelligent Internet search agent based on Genetic Algorithms using Java and C++ is reported, which is grounded on automatic textual analysis of Web documents and general-purpose search algorithms. It aims to address the Web search problem by creating dynamic and intelligent search agents that take users' requests and perform realtime, customized searches. The genetic algorithm is used to form an intelligent search strategy for the agent. The crossover and mutation operators are specially designed to deal with the generation of new homepages. Experiments are presented to show the performance and efficiency of the search agent.