Electronic shopping agent which is capable of operating with vendor sites which have disparate formats

摘要

A shopping bot uses real time agents that automatically contact disparate web pages representing vast variety of different categories and merchants and retrieve and unify the information therein for display when a request for the information is made. Consequently, there is no need to create a "wrapper", or a "information adapter" for each category or each merchant because the same agent can retrieve and process information in various formats. In particular, the shopping bot generates queries from keywords entered by a user and a database of URL information. Information returned by the queries is filtered, parsed and mapped to a standard format. The formatted information can then be displayed. Since the information is converted to the standard format in real time, the invention allows quick addition of online merchants and additional product categories can be added quickly and easily. Further, information about a product item can be easily enlarged as market needs increase without changing a database of codes one-by-one. In accordance with one embodiment, the database of URL information includes URLs specific to site directories at each merchant site so that queries can be easily generated by appending user-provided keywords.