Ecommerce Bots

This page is maintained by shamos+@cs.cmu.edu and is still under construction. Please report omissions and dead links to the author.

Topics covered:

Agent Toolkits
Auction Bots
Employment Bots
Financial Bots
Finder Bots.  Locate people or businesses
Filter Bots
General
Geneology Bots
Geography Bots
Health Bots
Legal Bots
Mail Bots.  Handling your email
Message Bots
Multimedia Bots
News Bots
Picture Bots.  Find images
Postal Bots.  Look up ZIP codes
Price Bots
Search Bots

Shopping Bots
Software Locating Bots
Telephone Directory Bots
Translation Bots
Travel Agents
Weather Bots
Web Bots.  Info about the WWW

Agent Toolkits

AgentBuilder.  From Reticular Systems, Inc.
COMPARISON OF AGENT-BUILDING TOOLS
INDEX OF AGENT CONSTRUCTION TOOLS

Auction Bots and Sites

Auction Watchers.   Searches auction lists for best prices by product category.
AuctionUniverse.  Auction tracker
Bidder's Edge.  Watches auctions and specific items up for bid.
BidFind.  Keyword search of web auctions.
eBay.
edeal.com.
FirstAuction.
surplusauction.com.  (Egghead)
uBid.com.

Company Intelligence

Wright Research Center (company profiles)

Employment Bots

CareerPath.com.  Find a job, find an employee, search company profiles.
Virtual Job Fair.  Search for companies, articles about job hunting, job fairs.  From Westech.

Financial Bots

CNNfn.  Quotes, charts and finincial news from CNN.
Discover Brokerage.  Stock quotes.
EDGAR Online.  SEC filings.
European financial bots (list from DoubleClick)
Hoover's Online.  Company information.
INVESTools.  Quotes and stock analysis reports.
justquotes. Financial information bot that finds information about publicly traded companies.  EXCELLENT.
Market Guide.  Stock quotes and summarized financial data.
NetProphet.   Free download of stock monitor from Neural Applications Corp.
NewsALERT.  Quotes and most recent news stories about companies.
NewsPage.  Quotes and company news from News Edge Corp.
Personal Stock Monitor.  Free download from DTLink Software.
Quicken.com quotes.   Historicals from Intuit, Inc. based on S&P quotes.
Quote Server.  Stock quotes from CheckFree.  Can request up to 5 quotes simultaneously
SalomonSmithBarney.   Stock and mutual fund quotes and charts.
Silicon Investor.  Quotes, charts and news stories.
StockAgent Pro.  Free download from Insanely Great Software.
StockMaster.  Historical stock quotes from StockMaster.com, Inc.
Stock Point.  Stock quotes and analysis from stockpoint.com.
Yahoo! Finance.  Stock quotes and company-specific news.

Filter Bots

iAtlas.  Filter web searches by business size and category.

Finder Bots

ClassMates.   Find high school classmates.  Free registration required.
infospace.  Web directory
Internet Address Finder.  Find people by email address or domain.
MESA (finds email addresses)
PeopleLink.   Finds people in communities on the Web.
Populus
Switchboard.  Includes home page addresses.
WhoWhere?   From Lycos.
Zip2.  From AltaVista.

General

Search Engine Colossus (lists engines worldwide)
SearchIQ (about metasearchers)
Web robot database.  Links to 200 robots.

Geneology Bots

Ancestry.com.   Family surname search.

Geography Bots

MapBlast! Locates nearby businesses.
Mapquest.   View maps of any area in the U.S.
NASA Satellite Photos
Switchboard.  Find businesses near a given address.

Health Bots

AMA Physician SelectFind a doctor by name or specialty.
HealthAtoZ.com.  Health info search bot.

Legal Bots

All Law

Mail Bots

MESA (finds email addresses)
SmartBot.   Email autoresponder.

Message Bots

ICQ.  Instant messaging, people locator.

Multimedia Bots

Arriba Vista
fastv.com (video search)
Internet Movie Database
Scour (multimedia)

News Bots

Business Wire.   Very recent news stories selectable by date and region.
DigitalCity.  Searches the country for news about specific cities.
foxnews.com.  Create your own newscast from video clips.
HP Instant Delivery.   Examines the Web for stories of interest.  Requires free download.
Los Angeles Times.  Search by subject, keyword, ticker symbol.
Morning Paper.  Summarizes news from different sources.  Requires free download.
PR Newswire.  Search capability by subject, date, industry, keyword, company.
San Jose Mercury.  Search by keyword, company name, ticker symbol.
Yahoo!news

Postal Bots

ZIP+4 Code Lookup.  U.S. Postal Service.

Price Bots

BestBookBuys.com.   Compares 26 booksellers.
bottomdollar
infospace.  Price comparison bot.
PriceSCAN.   Comparative pricing of books, computers, electronics, movies, music, sporting goods and video games.
Price Watch.  Computer hardware and software and consumer electronics.

Search Bots

Directories
About
Aiewi
Links2Go
Open Directory Project
Snap
Yahoo

International Search
All Web Vision (India)
Altavista (Korea)
Anzwers (Australia and New Zealand)
Arianna (Italy)
Askalex (UK)
Catcha (Indonesia)
Diabolos (Italty and Europe)
Euroseek (Europe)
Howhunt (China)
Kachi.com (Korea)
Lambadi.com (India)
Robby (Greece)
StartKorea (Korea)
Voila (France)
Web.de (Germany)
WebWombat (Australia and New Zealand)
www.fi (Finland)
Yam (Taiwan)

Metasearchers (automatically submit query to multiple engines)
Beaucoup
BigHub
BrightGate
Dataware
Debriefing
Dogpile
InFind
Ixquick
Mamma
Metacrawler
RedeSearch
search.com
WhatUSeek
ZWorks

Paid Listing Engines
Ah-Ha (child-safe)
eFind
FindWhat
GoTo
Kanoodle
7Search
Sprinks
Win4Win

Search Engines
All-In-One
Altavista
AOL
AskJeeves
BigHub.com.   Metasearcher
DejaNews (search Usenet newsgroups)
DirectHit
Excite
Fast (the largest and fastest search engine)
Go
google
Hotbot
InferenceFind.   Searches for websites based on keywords.
InfoPlease (almanac search)
iWon (awards daily prizes)
LookSmart
Lycos
Magellan
MSN
Netscape
Northern Light
Raging Search (Altavista engine without frills - very fast)
SavvySearch
Search Engine Portal (good for non-US search engines)
StartingPoint
WebCrawler

Shopping Bots

All-Internet Shopping Directory.   Poor search engine.
AltaMax Online Shopper.   Sort by price, product & vendor for a wide varity of products.  Free trial download.
Auction Watchers.  Searches auction lists for best prices.
BizWeb.  Guide to more than 43,000 companies in 200 categories.  Excellent search capability.
bottomdollar.  Organized by category, e.g. kitchen items.
Brandpoint.  More than 500 retailers of brand-name products.
buy.com.  Shopping portal with price comparisons
BuyDirectory.  Search in multiple languages.
Buyers Index.  Over 96 million products from 13,000 websites.
CompareNet. Extensive search by brand name.
ComputerShopper.com.  Sale and auction of computer products by ZDnet.
CyberMall.com.  Navigation to specilty online malls.
DealPilot.  Books, music, movies.   Formerly Acses.
Frictionless Value Shopper.   Allows specification of feature preferences. 
jango.com. (Excite)
KillerApp.  Extensive computer shopping bot.
mySimon.  Categorized keyword shopping search.
NetMarket.  Huge directory with "HaggleZone" for negotiating.
oneseek.com.  Directory with "WebChains"
Planet Retail. Huge directory.
priceline.com.  You name your price for home financing, new cars, hotel rooms and airline tickets.
RoboShopperFinds sites offering products by category.
Shopfind.  Locates by category sites offering products online.
shopper.com.  Limited primarily to computers and consumer electronics.  From CNET.
Shopping Explorer.   Parallel search for products.  Requires free download.
Shopping.com.  An AltaVista company.
Spree.com.  400,000 members receive cash rebates on purchases.
StoreSearch.  Products from 100,000 stores.
TechShopper.  For technical products.  From CMP.
Top 10 Guide.
WebMarket.  Performs price comparisons.
Yahoo!Shopping.  Advertises "thousands of stores, millions of products."

Software-Locating Bots

DaveCentral
Shareware
SoftCrawler
WinSite
ZDnet

Telephone Directory Bots

192.com (UK)
555-1212.com.   Includes reverse lookup.
AnyWho (AT&T)   Includes reverse lookup.
BigBook.  Nationwide Yellow Pages.
BigYellow.  National Yellow Pages.   Requires state to be specified.
Global Yellow-Pages.   International directories from 40 countries.
Infobel.  Yellow pages from 182 countries!
Infospace.  Personal search, Internet search, shopping search.
Páginas Amarillas Online (Spain)

Translation Bots

Babelfish
Babylon
T-Sail

Travel Agents

cheaptickets.com.
Expedia Travel
Thomas Cook.  Travel services; traveler's checks
Travelocity.   Based on the SABRE airline reservation system.

Weather Bots

Weather Channel.  Forecasts, radar maps
Yahoo!Weather

Web Bots

Link Popularity.   FInd the sites that link to a given site.