Seeks is all about setting up collaborative search rings. Within a ring you can get recommended results from others for every of you own queries, and you can let others get you results that you do recommend as well. Typically, clicking on search results will boost up the ranking of these results on similar queries for other users within the ring.
Now, sharing your results requires that your machine running Seeks be available as a server to others on the network. Most often this is not the case. If you are running Seeks on your laptop for instance, it is unlikely you do let others connect to it from the outside.
For this reason Seeks allows the cross-posting of your recommendations to a public Seeks server. Cross-posting means that every result you click or recommend is remembered on your machine, but also on the remote Seeks server of you choice. The remote Seeks server is available to others to connect to (by including the server into the ring). Therefore other users can benefit from your search results curation even if you are not running a server yourself.
Cross-posting is not enabled by default but we encourage you to enable it. And doing so is easy!
Locate your query-capture-config file (from the source package, in src/plugins/query_capture), and find the following section
# Seeks node URL to which to cross-post recommended results. # default: none cross-post-url http://www.seeks-project.info/search_exp.php
Uncomment the
cross-post-url http://www.seeks-project.info/search_exp.php
option and use the default Seeks public server, or the one of your choice.
Restart your Seeks instance, and this is it, you are now sharing your search result selection with the world!
As a last word, note that the users who will benefit from your sharing have no possible way to know that you are behind the recommended result. This is because the public Seeks server lies in between your machine and that of other users.
