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Seeks Project: Let's take back Websearch

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Seeks Project: Let's take back Websearch
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64
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CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Conventional websearch is a solitary and locked place. Searchers are forced to interact with remote proprietary black boxes with no possible feedback, and are isolated from each others. There's an estimated billion queries issued everyday by several hundred millions of users. Those queries are grounded into real life events and activities common to many searchers. However, users cannot share their experience and build the results together. Seeks develops a decentralized architecture for enabling collaborative websearch. This short talk intends to outline the Seeks architecture, and to show in simple words how Seeks allows its users to issue queries and get answers from other users while not revealing the true query itself. Seeks is an open peer-to-peer architecture and a free software application for enabling collaborative websearch. 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. On this basis, Seeks allows for true real-time, decentralized, websearch to emerge. In the long term, there is no need for web crawlers and third-party web indexes as users ca npush content directly to the groups of seekers. By hashing queries, Seeks offers a unique solution that allows to issue queries and get answers while not revealing the true query itself. In its present state, Seeks is a free software meta-search engine that can be deployed on local or remote machines. Seeks supports a fair set of options, from thumbnails to more advanced and experimental features such as content similarity analysis, automated clustering and personalization of results. While in its early phase, Seeks aims at demonstrate that there exists a path toward collaborative, efficient, free software powered websearch on the Internet.