[axel77]

For me an agent is a (theoretical) piece of software you send away, that does collect/process information somewhere else based on its code, and then comes back with the data. Maybe we misunderstood what we were talking about.

To some very primitive degree of this is the way how gnutella searches work. You send away your query string with your destination IP, and it will spread itself autonomously over the gnutella network, and every node that has a hit, or knows of a hit sends the answer to your IP. However its a very primitive searching technique which a) only searches contents from the title line. b) It takes eons to get a good answer list. I mean just imagine the code of google, they have the whole internet indexed (apart from the invisible deep net) and you hit any query, and get an answer in milli seconds... just imagine what great development there is behind this... If somebody would have asked me 20 years ago, if such is technically possible, I'd have said no... And I did see the pre-altavista days, where webcrawler results came drippling it piece by piece.... unsorted of course...