BUYER AGENTS

Buyer agents travel around a network (very likely the Internet) finding information and bringing to back to you. Buyer agents are also called shopping bots. These agents search the internet for goods and services that you need and bring you back the information.

A buyer agent or shopping bot is an intelligent agent on a web site that helps you, the customer, find products and services you want. Shopping bots work very efficiently for commodity products such as CDs, books, electronic components, and other one size fits all products.

Shopping bots make money by making advertising space, conducting special promotion in cooperation with merchants or charging click trough fees which are payments to the site that provide the link to the merchant site. Some shopping bots give preferences to certain sites for a financial consideration. The people who run the shopping bot sites have two competing objectives they want to present as many listing as possible to the costumer in the most useful way, but they also want to make money doing it.

MySimon.com is the most successful shopping bot to date with more than a million visitors a month according to Nielsen/Netratings. MySimon searches for millions of products or thousands of websites.

Government sites have search and retrieved agents you can use to get the information you need. FERRET (Federal Electronics Research and Review Extraction Tool) was developed jointly by Census Bureau of Labor is Statistics with FERRET you can find information on employment, health care. Education, race and ethnicity, health insurance, housing, income and poverty, aging and marriage and family.