Seeks

Seeks is an open source project licensed under the AGPLv3. Seeks goal is to create an alternative search engine to the current commercially available market leading search engines that is driven by user concerns rather than corporate interests.^[1] The original manifesto was created by Emmanuel Benazera and Sylvio Drouin and published in October 2006.^[2] Since then the project has been under active development and stable releases of the engine are available for public utilization in addition to various distributions of the source code for adventurous users. In September 2011, Seeks as received an innovation award at the open world forum^[3]

User control

Seeks aims to give the control of the ranking of results to the users, as an algorithm can't be accurate, as a human can be.^[4] It relays on a distributed collaborative filter^[5] to let users personalize and share their preferred results on a search. Also, because of the openness of the source code, the user is able to verify, and modify the collaborative filter to fit its needs.

Forms

Currently Seeks can be utilized in three main forms:

1. Public Search Engines - These are various individuals or entities that have created publicly accessible instances of the Seeks source code. This is the easiest way to begin using Seeks, as it operates in a similar manner to any other search engine.
2. Web Proxy - Based on the popular Privoxy open source code, this allows one to set up Seeks to operate as a web proxy which intercepts network requests for search queries and returns Seeks based results.
3. Web Application - This allows one to set up an instance of the web search interface on a local system. It allows for further customization than is available with the use of a public node.

Features

• Results are automatically re-ranked based on user behavior.
• Results are automatically re-ranked based on behavior by similar users.
• The software can be run in a distributed, P2P manner, which enhances privacy while distributing workload and sharing re-ranking data in an anonymous manner.
• As open source software, the source code and binaries are freely available and can be used for commercial and personal endeavors with a large range of freedom.
• It utilizes various commercial engines, public data sources or privately set search engines to generate its index and in this manner serves as a meta-search engine while at the same time re-ranking results to optimize based on user behavior.

Weaknesses

• As with all software, it faces challenges on the security and privacy fronts.
• It does not have a built-in crawler, instead relying upon other crawlers for a source index.
• The P2P nature of the engine results in slightly slower response times for search queries.
• Currently the application is written for *nix based systems and does not easily run on Windows systems except via public nodes.

See also

• YaCy - An open source search engine written in Java which includes its own crawler.
• Faroo - A proprietary, P2P search engine written in .NET.
• Collaborative Search Engine - Search Engines which actively or passively take user behavior into consideration in ranking results.
• OpenSearch - A standard protocol for publishing search results in a consumable format.

References

1. ^ p2pnet. "Seeking help with Seeks". http://www.p2pnet.net/story/42507. 
2. ^ Benazera, Emmanuel. "SEEKS Project Manifesto". SEEKS Project Manifesto. http://seeks-project.info/manifesto.html. 
3. ^ "OpenWordForum Innovation Awards". http://www.openworldforum.org/Univers/Think/Innovation-Awards. 
4. ^ Human computation
5. ^ "Self-Organizing Distributed Collaborative Filtering". http://www.cs.vu.nl/ishare/public/I-Share-P16v1.0.pdf. 

External links

• Google ? Scroogle ? or Seeks?, P2Pnet, July 2010.
• Seeks delivers new search engine paradigm, Sourceforge's blog, June 2010.
• Seeks Project: Let's take back Websearch, FOSDEM, 2011.