RUMOUR mongers beware: software robots are patrolling the Internet with the
sole purpose of tracing idle or malicious gossip to its source.
The potential for a program like this is enormous, says Stephane Perino,
founder of Agence Virtuelle in Geneva, Switzerland, which launched its RumorBot
software last week at the Bot 2001 conference in San Francisco. Companies could
use it to track down a speculator who starts a rumour that affects its share
prices. Or detectives could trace the source of paedophile photographs traded on
the Net.
鈥淭he idea is to track and analyse, in real time, online newsgroups, chatrooms
and lists,鈥� says Perino. More than eight million new Web pages and Internet
postings appear each day, so it鈥檚 impossible to manually check every possible
source.
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Instead RumorBot employs 44 software agents to check through all the
available search engines and Usenet databases searching for key words. By
analysing the time and location of each posting, and comparing their results,
they can work out where the first hint of the rumour occurred.
RumorBot will also be able to understand questions posed in everyday
鈥渘atural鈥� language, such as: 鈥淲here did the rumour that Acme鈥檚 share price would
go through the roof originate?鈥�