Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online
7.19. Knowbots? Cool! What are those?
Well, it sounds much cooler than it is, at least in my opinion. Knowbots are an
organized set of autonomous programs that know how to search a specific
database of information on the Internet. When they're done, they report all
their results to a master program, which can then report back to you the
results of the multiresource search. The problem is that this service is just
fantastically resource-expensive, so as fast as people are learning about
Knowbot sites, those sites are limiting their access or shutting down
completely. A quick search with Veronica found lots of descriptive documents,
including one that explains that the Knowbot service is available through the
Corporation for National Research Initiatives computer in Virginia. Based on
that information, you can check out the Knowbot Information Service by using
Telnet to connect to nri.reston.va.us. You'll need to specify that you
want to connect to port 185 (for example, on UNIX, you can type telnet
nri.reston.va.us 185 to do this).
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