An approach to mobile software robots for the WWW

This paper describes a framework for developing mobile software robots by u sing the PLANET mobile object system, which is characterized by language-ne utral layered architecture, the native code execution of mobile objects, an d asynchronous object passing. We propose an approach to implementing mobil e Web search robots that takes full advantage of these characteristics, and we base our discussion of its effectiveness on experiments conducted in th e Internet environment. The results show that the PLANET approach to mobile Web search robots significantly reduces the amount of data transferred via the Internet and that it enables the robots to work more efficiently than the robots in the conventional stationary scheme whenever nontrivial amount s of HTML files are processed.