A Tour Guide for the World Wide Web
We explore the notion of a tour guide software agent for assisting users browsing the World Wide Web A Web tour guide agent provides assistance similar to that provided by a human tour guide in a museum it guides the user along an appropriate path through the collec tion based on its knowledge of the user s in terests of the location and relevance of var ious items in the collection and of the way in which others have interacted with the col lection in the past This paper describes a simple but operational tour guide called Web Watcher which has given over tours to people browsing CMU s School of Computer Science Web pages WebWatcher accompanies users from page to page suggests appropriate hyperlinks and learns from experience to im prove its advice giving skills We describe the learning algorithms used by WebWatcher ex perimental results showing their e ectiveness and lessons learned from this case study in Web tour guide agents