Invisible workhorses let you compare product, price, value

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff

It's almost the end of the millennium, and just as the science-fiction writers predicted, robots are everywhere. But most don't look anything like those dreamed up by Isaac Asimov.

In fact, they're quite invisible. These robots, more commonly called bots, are computer programs that scour the Internet to do our bidding. Instead of nuts and bolts, they're made of bits and bytes. But that doesn't make them any less useful. As a matter of fact, they can even help you do the shopping. ''Shopbots'' or ''shopping agents'' are programs that will hunt down bargains on the Internet. Sites with names like mySimon.com, BizRate.com, DealPilot.com and BottomDollar.com enable anyone to shop dozens or hundreds of on-line retailers in seconds. It's more than a consumer's dream; it's an experiment in instant capitalism, with fascinating implications for the way we buy and sell things.

''Today we search over 1,800 merchants,'' says Josh Goldman, president and chief executive officer of mySimon.com Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., ''from small mom-and-pops who put up a storefront to the biggest of the big.''

At mySimon you can search for a variety of items, from software to shoes. When a user enters a search, the bot instantly fires off a query to the Web site of each retailer that would carry such an item. Back comes a listing of suitable products, the on-line retailers that sell them, and the prices charged.

While mySimon gives pride of place on its site to companies that pay for more prominent display, most of the sites listed have no business relationship to the site. A team of Web surfers has simply identified them as good retailers and added them to the bot's database.

Some of mySimon's rivals do more than look for the lowest possible price. For instance, BizRate offers guidance about which retailers are worthy of trust. ''Our plan has always been to take the Web and use it for the benefit of consumers,'' says Farhad Mohit, president, chief executive officer, and co-founder of Los Angeles-based BizRate.

Any Web retailer can request a listing on BizRate (so far, about 1,900 have), but none can buy premium placement. Indeed, all are subject to the scrutiny of BizRate monitors, who try out every store and rate the quality of service.

Shoppers also rate BizRate stores, and their reports are used to generate site ratings that are prominently displayed next to the name of each store.

BizRate also has a share-the-wealth policy. Some retailers ay a rebate to BizRate when te user makes a purchase. Instead of keeping this money, whenever a registered BizRate user runs up more than $15 in rebates, BizRate deducts $3 for itself and sends the rest to the user.

Perhaps Books.com, a retailer that competes with on-line giants like Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble (www.bn.com or www.barnesandnoble.com) and Borders.com, runs the most surprising shopbot on the Web. Ask for a book, and Books.com comes back with a price quote - and a price-comparison button. Press it, and a bot checks the price of the same book at rival booksellers. If one of them has the book at a lower price, the bot automatically cuts the Books.com price even lower.

To Jeff Kephart, who studies bots at IBM's Watson Research Center, this heralds a future in which bots could make some of our economic decisions for us, with no direct human intervention. ''They start behaving as economic agents themselves,'' Kephart says. If designers aren't careful, Kephart notes, bots could generate automated price wars, with computers trying to out-discount each other in an uncontrolled race to the bottom.

But this assumes that bots won't get any smarter, and they're actually getting smarter all the time. What if bots could search, not just for the lowest price, but the best value, based on the tastes and desires of each consumer?

Cambridge-based Frictionless Commerce (www.frictionless.com) has created a next-generation shopping agent that aims to do this. Waltham-based Lycos, one of the world's biggest Web portals, has signed on to install the Frictionless bot on its new LycoShop (shop.lycos.com) shopping site. Instead of just looking for discounts, the Frictionless agent gently leads the user through a series of questions to determine just what he or she is looking for. For instance, if a user asks to see CD players, the bot will ask whether the user is a hard-core music lover in search of top performance, or a casual listener with a limited budget. The questions keep coming: What brand does the user prefer? How many discs should the changer hold? Should the player have a remote control? In this way, the bot can satisfy the consumer who wants more than just a low price.

If such bots got into a bidding war, they could compete on service as well as price. A future automated shopping system could let a customer agree to a higher price in exchange for some other consideration - an earlier delivery date, say, or a longer warranty. Bots from several retailers would race across the Web, swapping offer and counter-offer, each vying to come up with just the right package to win the deal and leave rival bots out in the cold. It's not exactly a Hollywood-style vision of robot warfare, but it'd be a lot more profitable.

Hiawatha Bray covers technology for the Globe. His e-mail address is bray@globe.com.