Introduction

The itsy bitsy spider will crawl the Web in search of pages which might interest you. You tell the spider what type of homepages you are interested in by giving it URLs (http addresses) to start from and it will surf the Net for you by following links, looking at those pages, and reporting back on homepages of interest to you. Please allow several minutes for the spider to perform the real-time dynamic search. The itsy bitsy spider begins with the URLs you provide, along with some randomly selected homepages. Then, it follows the links on those pages deeper and deeper. At each page the spider will pause and compare it with the original pages. Those pages which are most similar to the original pages you provided to the spider will get a higher ranking. The ranking is used to compute the probability for retention from one iteration to the next. For every iteration the spider will consult a database of URLs and selectively add new ones to look at, in hopes that some new and pertinent links will be found. The number of random URLs added to the search is determined by the mutation rate. The spider keeps a list of the best pages found since the start of the search and those are displayed after each iteration. The itsy bitsy spider performs a global search of the Web as opposed to the BFS spider which only searches the local space.

Instruction

Type the starting URL(s) in the space provided. Enter one or more keywords. Category selection is optional. The time out and number of URLs to be returned can be adjusted. Press submit. The crossover and mutation rates can be adjusted before the search is started or while it is in progress.

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