Evaluating Adaptive Web Site Agents

We discuss the design and evaluation of a class of agents that we call adaptive web site agents. The goal of such an agent is to help a user find information at a particular web site, adapting its behavior in response to the actions of the individual user and the actions of other visitors to the web site. The agent recommends related documents to visitors. It integrates and coordinates among different reasons for making recommendations including user preference for subject area, similarity between documents, frequency of citation, frequency of access, and patterns of access by visitors to the web site. We argue that this information is best used not to change the structure or content of the web site but rather to change the behavior of an animated agent that assists the user.