We report an autonomous agent for retrieving competitors' product prices over the World Wide Web, for the purpose of price comparison at an e-commerce retail shop. This price watcher model is different from the conventional price comparison services currently available on the Internet in a way that it collects competitors' price information without the competitors' participation and attention. It scans the price information over the Internet on a regular basis, builds up a knowledge base at the user's site and provides a price comparison facility for shoppers to use. It is an information retrieval utility that could be used as a part of the business intelligence infrastructure. This paper summaries the application background as well as the technical details in the design of the prototype.
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