Features

Some time back we announced the first public prototype of 6S, a peer application for social, distributed, adaptive Web search. Thanks to the feedback of our early testers, we have made many improvements and today we are launching v.0.3. We invite you to visit http://sixearch.org to download this latest version, or to participate in a user study by downloading a special version of the application that will allow us to collect anonymous usage statistics. If you are already participating in our user study, we thank you and invite you to upgrade. If you have not tried 6S before, now is a good time to join the new and improved sixearch.org community.

The 6S app, which runs on Windows, MacOSX, or Linux, will help you create your personal Web collection, search it, share it, and discover what others have shared. 6S will build your collection with a single click, or you can customize it by importing your bookmarks, crawling the Web, or indexing pages and documents. You can search not only your personal collection, but also other 6S peers. When you submit a query, your 6S agent will determine which peers are best suited to answer it based on previous interactions. Your 6S agent will also learn from the results it receives, so that it can continuously improve.

Go to http://sixearch.org to learn more, to download 6S, or to participate in our study. The new v.0.3 not only has a new look and feel, but also several new functionalities to make it more user-friendly, such as:

• Main control via a system tray icon (Windows) or menu icon (MacOSX)
• Runs in the background without having to keep an application window open
• Online/offline status to temporarily disconnect from the sixearch.org network
• One-click index construction from bookmarks and search history, and automatic updating
• New Firefox extension to search the 6S community and to bookmark and tag pages
• Network viewer providing a real time snapshot of the latest 6S network activity
• New privacy settings consistent with published privacy policy

For anyone who has already installed a previous version of 6S and wishes to keep their personal Web collection, you can find a patch file from the download page. Please note that you have to install the latest Firefox browser extension to access the sixearch.org network from your browser. The extension is bundled with the program package, or can be downloaded separately from the download page.

We are looking forward to your participation and your feedback, for which we have created a forum linked from http://sixearch.org. Thank you very much for your consideration, and happy 2008!

The 6S team: Le-Shin Wu, Ruj Akavipat, and Filippo Menczer, Indiana University School of Informatics

Filippo Menczer
Lagrange Senior Fellow (2007-2008)
CNLL, ISI Foundation, Torino, Italy

and

Departments of Informatics & Computer Science
Indiana University, Bloomington
http://informatics.indiana.edu/fil