Seeks is a free and open technical design that allows users to share their queries to existing search engines.
Its specific purpose is to regroup users whose queries are similar so they can share both the query results and their experience on these results.
Applications and benefits are rather broad, ranging from social websearch to dating and the building of communities based on interests, professional activities, etc…
Seeks builds a social search overlay network and database on top of the Internet and as thus includes many important features such as:
- Websites ratings, ranking and collaborative filtering,
- Query sharing and reuse of the experience of others,
- Discussion and comments on websites,
- Chat and discussion among search groups,
- Social monitoring of search group activity: you have access to the popularity of search queries in real time,
- Direct publishing system: the pushing of websites’ URL directly into the search groups through direct posting. This allows to get rid of crawlers and enables true real-time websearch.
But most importantly, Seeks is intended to live as a flagship for fair, user controlled searches over the Internet. Working as groups, users are able to control, rate and discuss results to their queries, as obtained from existing search engines. In a bold move to correct the unfair advantage of corporations and other powerful entities against individuals in search results, Seeks allows anyone to link their website or service to any group of interest. To do so, the publisher registers their work under a set of queries, and lets Seeks connect the content to the users performing similar queries.
Over the time Seeks makes the plan to gradually move away from existing engines, building its own public index, for the users, monitored by the users. Seeks builds on the idea that groups of users are stronger than the individuals that make them. Existing websearch engines live out of the division of the Internet users, forcing them to repeat millions of identical queries, thus lacking the benefits of social experience and filtering, while feeding on their personal data. Seeks is one technical solution, among others, to return the websearch to who it belongs: the users. An application is under development. The Seeks application is a peer-to-peer pattern matching tool. It builds on regular peer-to-peer overlay network paradigms. This allows full privacy and user control over the searches.
