Announcing sixearch.org

*** Announcing sixearch.org ***

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

Please visit http://sixearch.org where you will find a link to an  
informed consent form if you wish to help us by participating in our  
user study.  This study has been approved by Indiana University's  
Human Subjects Committee (Study # 06-11620).

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