Active measure

Search engines

Digital's Altavista (www.altavista.com) - estimated to cover 40% of the 50-60 million Web documets

Hotwired's HotBot (www.hotwired.com) - built using technology from Inktomi - indexes not only the full-text, but also the location the page, and performs an analysis for relevance; also it recognizes multimedia files; (54 million documents - as of 30 Sep. 1996)

Active agents

Bob Kahn introduced the idea of knowbots - Knowledge Robots

Infrastructure providing a virtual extension to the handheld

Via distributed processing - the user's device gains not only communication and information access, but also additional functionality - either on demand (when needed) or as downloaded "upgrade".