By Doug Bedell

Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News

Marcus Zillman worries about his bots.

As the head of BotTechnology.com and an expert in Internet shopping robots -- software "agents" that scour the Web for consumer prices -- he's concerned about their IQ. ("They're very dumb, God love 'em.") He's afraid they're misunderstood. ("Whenever the computer crashes, the first thing blamed is the little bot.") And he's obsessed with finding them friends. ("The big thing is for these little fellas to be able to talk and communicate back and forth.")

But Mr. Zillman, sees a bright future for the next generation of these popular shopping tools, even as his current flock of "little fellas" continues to take the Web by storm with services like mySimon, Webmarket and Bottomdollar. "The best has yet to begin," he says.

Within the next 18 months, bots will be imbued with powers beyond the ability to return simple comparison pricing tables. "People will be able to tell their won personal bot to go out and buy for them at a set price," says Mr. Zillman, co-founder of the BotSpot.com Web site. "Bots will go out and do the haggling for them. We've talked about that for years, but now it's about to become a reality."

When that happens, "Tell us what your bot bought today, honey" may become part of dinner table conversation.

But right now, consumers probably find bot-land bewildering. More than 50 shopping bots and services have swept into the market in the last two years. Many claim "exclusive" or "special" deals with merchandisers. Each has its own peculiar merchant alliances and hidden ways of making money. On top of that, new breeds are emerging daily, like Dallas-based iChoose (www.ichoose.com) and its "desktop agent" that intercepts transactions at checkout to present better prices.

Beyond the convenience and apparent benefits, the advent of these intelligent search agents may bring new concerns, warns James V. Koch, current president of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., and an Internet economist.

In fact, says Dr. Koch, bots can actually be rigged to return results based on who you are, rather than the best pricing available. "If the consumer uses bots wisely and correctly, they can typically find a lower price," says Dr. Koch, whose students are analyzing shopping bot behavior. "But consumers shouldn't think that the only way these things can be used is to their benefit.

"These technologies can be used in a reverse direction very easily."

STATE OF THE BOT

In the "old days" of the Internet -- back in the early 1990's -- the first robots carried silly comic strip names like Archie, Veronica and Jughead. These server-based tools allowed fast access to new software and information stored in public "Gopher" sites around the globe./p

Today, in a vastly more complex and graphical Internet, specialized bots have been developed for just about every search requirement demanded by consumers. Everyday, bots send out millions of "spider" programs to pick through billions of pages of text and graphics on their quest for specialized information.

Mr. Zillman started BotSpot.com in an attempt to keep up with them all, and his site quickly became a destination for those interested in the latest developments. In addition to about 50 general interest shopping services, BotSpot -- now owned by Internet.com -- now also catalogs dozens of bots round up mortgage and stock quotes. Others gather information on online gaming competitions (Game Bots), the latest headlines (News Bots) and software updates (Update Bots), or are exclusive to certain types of information, such as Government Bots, which only troll for data inside Web sites carrying the .gov extension.

But the growth of the commercial Web sector -- where Americans spent about $11.9 billion last year -- has prompted developers to trot out some of their most far-reaching designs. BotSpot.com has devoted an entire section to reviewing Shopping Bots at www.shoppingbots.com. The Starting Page (www.startingpage.com/html/shopping.htm) also makes an attempt to rank and rate them, as does Gomez.com and TheWhiz.com.

Certainly, shopping bots have made an impact just because they save shoppers endless hours of Web surfing in a quest for products at a attractive price.

The whole world of Internet shopping, however, is still rather new for everyone. A survey by Jupiter Communications recently suggested that more than 60 percent of shoppers remain wary of giving information to an online site. Merchants, meanwhile have had their own problems with bots. Some have gone so far as to develop elaborate defenses that reject bot price queries.

"I think in very beginning merchants wanted to block the bots," says Brian Rolfe, director of communications for mySimon.com, which was one of the first bots on the Net in 1998. "They didn't know that they were for, and they were afraid they would be reduced to fulfillment houses. They didn't want to spend a whole lot of money building their brand, then be reduced to just a price and a product."

Watch mySimon and the other shopping bots work, and you can easily see the problem. These services find items, then display a ranked list usually by lowest-to-highest price -- all within the bot's home site. No one visits the merchant's Web site -- and the merchant's advertising -- until a selection is made.

Several services began erecting barriers to the shopping bots, hoping to keep their pricing -- and Web traffic -- to themselves.

"They didn't want to be compared with everybody else," says Mr. Rolfe. "We said, "Don't look at us as an enemy. Look at us as a friend and a potential traffic driver for you." The people who come to mySimon know what they're going to buy and they have their credit card in their hand. They're ready to buy something. They know what, but they just don't know where."

MySimon, in the meantime, offered to help merchants stand out in searches by selling them placement and space to explain their brands and service -- selling points that might influence consumers to bypass the lowest price in favor of familiarity and "comfort level."

Trepidation has gradually given way to cooperation.

Today, mySimon -- widely regarded by reviewers as one of the top general interest shopping bots -- boasts access to 2,600 merchants in 250 product categories. It claims to have attracted 10 million unique users so far. In rankings of shopping bots, nearly all mention mySimon near or at the top of their lists. Several repeat users have complained on discussion boards that mySimon only lists shipping costs if the merchant includes that information in the product description. And, as with other bot sites, the merchants who pay for placement are always listed on top of search results. MySimon allows one-click re-sorting by price -- something many other bot sites don't permit. "Nit-picking aside, mySimon is a great bot, and is well organized enough to help you find just about anything," says BotSpot.

Other shopping bots with regular mentions at the top of the heap include Webmarket.com (with product guides from Consumer's Digest), BottomDollar.com (Dr. Koch's favorite), Yahoo! Shopping (shopping.yahoo.com), Price Scan (www.pricescan.com), Excite Product Finder (shopping.excite.com) and Shop@Aol (shopping.aol.com).

Many of the entrepeneurs behind all these efforts say their toughest sell is to just get consumers to try out their services. "You're talking about a psycholical issue," says Rolfe of mySimon. "We fear what we don't know. You might try this and say, 'What was I doing out in the mall fighting traffic and the crowds when I should have been buying at home?' But, yes, there's a certain amount of fear because people don't know what happens when something goes on inside that box."

Says Zillman: "I think the public's still a little scared because they don't want anything running around on their desktops. You've got to educate them that it's not a threat. You hear so many of the negativity things that they're afraid this little guy is going to get loose on his computer and crash it."

BOT FUTURE IS BRIGHT

It may take time for people to warm to bots. But, predicts Mr. Zillman, the technology will gradually become more important. Bot users who own Internet-equipped, hand-held computers are already being seen inside stores, scoping out products, then getting prices from the Net.

"I can send my bots out to search from my Palm VII, and the results will be waiting on my desktop," says Mr. Zillman. "As I walk through the airport with my Palm VII, I can check my e-mail and send my bots out. God love it. It's the most wonderful thing that's ever existed."

Bot-makers hope to expand on this emerging role as a pre-purchase research tools. "If you only want to buy from a store with a location in your area code, we want to be able to give you that instantly," says Mr. Rolfe. "The idea is to personalize the service."

As new cell phones add Internet connectivity, the quick action of bots will help keep online time to a minimum. MySimon is planning to expand to European markets, where even local phone calls to hook up with the Internet are metered. Bots should be naturally attractive to those for home online time already costs a premium, says Mr. Rolfe.

Business-to-business applications may be worth ten times what consumers are shelling out, says Dr. Koch. And there may be other hidden applications that will make bots even more active on the Web. Hotel chains, for example, are realizing added profits by floating "dynamic" prices on bot sites -- moving room rates up and down depending on demand.

"That suggests something that sounds very futuristic -- bot versus bot," says Dr. Koch. "The consumer has a bot, but so does the firm. There are all sorts of possibilities."

On the downside for consumers, bots may allow merchants to surreptitiously fix prices. "They used to get together in some shady corner of a restaurant for that," says Dr. Koch. "Now you can do all this impersonally and electronically."

In the end, however, Mr. Zillman predicts his "little bots" will wind up working their way into more and more essential information gathering duties in the ever-expanding Web universe.

"Ultimately, I think we're going to have a personal electronic tool that will know our dislikes and likes and will be really be able to be a digital assistant," says Mr. Zillman. "It will be able to fetch information, gather information and keep us up to date with all this."

"You're going to have to have your little personal digital assistant," he says, "because it's just going to get worse."