When you enter the AntWorld, you specify your goals by typing in a description of the information you are interested in. This description along with the pages you've visited are referred to as a Quest. AntWorld analyzes the pages that you judge, and helps along with suggestions marked by the Ant icons (AntMarks). It uses your search activities to improve its understanding of your Quest. As that understanding improves, the list of suggestions will change, and the links marked with ants will become more relevant and useful for you. You may store a quest today, and come back any time later to resume it. In the meantime, Ant World will be watching all the other searches in the AntDomain, to come up with better suggestions and "AntMarks". AntWorld works because you, and others, are willing to vote on the goodness of pages and thus contribute personal knowledge, insight and intelligence. This grassroots knowledge makes the entire world wide web a more useful information-finding tool for all. Using other people's similar quests you can make a direct AntLink to a hard-to-find site.
As the diagram shows, AntWorld follows your Quest, and compares your judgments and evaluations to the database of stored Quests. When it finds related Quests, it examines the pages that were relevant to them (represented by arrows leading out of the stored Quests. When it finds a consensus (shown by the blue arrows) it provides an AntMark and recommendation which lets you jump directly to that relevant page (shown by the orange link that loops directly from your Quest to the target page in the Web).
Written by: Paul Kantor. September 1999.