From World-Wide Web to Super-Brain (1995)

, thus activating documents that contain all three concepts. This example can be easily generalized to the most diverse and bizarre problems. Whether it has to do with how you decorate your house, how you reach a particular place, how you remove stains of a particular chemical, what is the natural history of the Yellowstone region: whatever the problem you have, if some knowledge about the issue exists somewhere, spreading activation should be able to find it.

For the more ill-structured problems, the answer may not come immediately, but be reached after a number of steps. Just like in normal thinking, formulating part of the problem brings up certain associations which may then call up others that make you reformulate the problem in a better way, which leads to a clearer view of the problem and again a more precise description and so on, until you get a satisfactory answer. The web will not only provide straight answers but general feedback that will direct you in your efforts to get closer to the answer.

From thought to web agent

The mechanisms we have sketched allow the Web to act as a kind of external brain, storing a huge amount of knowledge while being able to learn and to make smart inferences, thus allowing you to solve problems for which your own brain's knowledge is too limited.

The search process should not require you to select a number of search engines in different places of the Web. The new technology of net