User-Manual Seeks Bubs-0.2-SOLO

From Seeks

This is the user manual for Seeks version 0.2.x aka Bubs, from the SOLO releases.

For more detailed operations, see the Seeks API.

Seeks philosophy is slightly different than that of other search engines. The search form (where one enters a term or phrase to search for) works exactly like any other search engine. Simply type in your query and click the Seeks button. For advanced users there are also some additional options one can use when searching.

Level 4 expansion

Where Seeks differentiates from most other engines is by its incremental search method which expands your websearch to include lower ranked results. The level of expansion is indicated on the Expansion button.

Tip: Perform your websearch, if none of the results seem satisfying, hit the Expansion button. Seeks will aggregate additional results every time you hit the Expansion button.

Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate among the results, by page. Navigation should be fast as the results are cached by Seeks. Note that the more expanded your websearch is the more pages you can navigate through.

Similarity analysis

Every result snippet comes with a similarity link. Clicking on it puts this snippet on top of the list, then re-ranks all other results in decreasing similarity order from this result. Seeks computes the similarity either by using the textual summary contained in the result snippet or by downloading the page content and processing it. For the latter, see the required configuration option.

Tip: Often you cannot find a direct answer to your query within the few first results. Find the first result that looks like it may contain a plausible answer. Then use the similarity link to sort the result by decreasing similarity to this link. More interesting similar results should jump up in the page.

After using similarity, a Back link allows you to come back to the original list of results. Alternatively you can click on the Seeks button, that has the same effect.

Grouping and sorting

Seeks allows to automatically sort and group result snippets either by urls, titles, or types.

Grouping by urls or by titles is sometimes useful, but the most interesting feature is grouping by types.

Tip: grouping by types is very useful. Videos, wikis, files, and more are put together. This eases most of the search of pertinent results.

Types grouping uses regular expressions. It is not too difficult to tweak the default parameters in order to define your own types. In future versions, Seeks will provide a simple extension framework for easing the personalization of types.

Clustering

Clustering is an experimental feature. Depending on feedback, it may or may not stay in future stable releases of Seeks.

Clustering automatically regroups results that seems similar given their textual content. Additionally, it computes a textual label for every cluster. Sometimes these labels are hardly useful, sometimes they are truly interesting.

More importantly clicking on any cluster label augments your query with the label words, and performs that query.

Tip: Expand your websearch a bit before clustering your results.

Tip: Use clustering when you are not too sure of what you are looking for, or when your query words are very approximate. Clustering will produce several groups of results and label them. Sometimes labels can be helpful for generating more precise queries.