Seeks is an open source project licensed under the AGPLv3. Seeks goal is to create an alternative search engine to the current commercially available market leading search engines that is driven by user concerns rather than corporate interests. The original manifesto was created by Emmanuel Benazera and Sylvio Drouin and published in October 2006. Since then the project has been under active development and stable releases of the engine are available for public utilization in addition to various distributions of the source code for adventurous users.

Forms

Currently Seeks can be utilized in three main forms:

1. Public Search Engines - These are various individuals or entities that have created publicly accessible instances of the Seeks source code. This is the easiest way to begin using Seeks, as it operates in a similar manner to any other search engine.
2. Web Proxy - Based on the popular Privoxy
   Privoxy
   Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers before the page is rendered by the browser. Privoxy is a "privacy enhancing proxy", filtering Web pages and removing advertisements...
   
    open source code, this allows one to setup Seeks to operate as a web proxy which intercepts network requests for search queries and returns Seeks based results.
3. Web Application - This allows one to setup an instance of the web search interface on a local system. It allows for further customization than is available with the use of a public node.

Features

• Results are automatically re-ranked based on user behavior.
• Results are automatically re-ranked based on behavior by similar users.
• The software can be run in a distributed, P2P manner, which enhances privacy while distributing workload and sharing re-ranking data in an anonymous manner.
• As open source software, the source code and binaries are freely available and can be used for commercial and personal endeavors with a large range of freedom.
• It utilizes various commercial engines to generate its index and in this manner serves as a meta-search engine while at the same time re-ranking results to optimize based on user behavior.

Weaknesses

• As with all software, it faces challenges on the security and privacy fronts.
• It does not have a built-in crawler, instead relying upon other crawlers for a source index.
• The P2P nature of the engine results in slightly slower response times for search queries.
• Currently the application is written for *nix based systems and does not easily run on Windows systems except via public nodes.

See also

• YaCy
  YaCy
  YaCy is a free distributed search engine, built on principles of peer-to-peer networks. Its core is a computer program written in Java distributed on several hundred computers, , so-called YaCy-peers...
  
   - An open source search engine written in Java which includes its own crawler.
• Faroo
  FAROO
  FAROO is a universal web search engine based on peer-to-peer technology. It uses a distributed crawler that stores search data on users' computers instead of a central server. Whenever a user visits a website, it is automatically indexed and distributed to the network...
  
   - A proprietary, P2P search engine written in .NET.
• Collaborative Search Engine
  Collaborative search engine
  Collaborative Search Engines are an emerging trend for Web search and Enterprise search within company intranets. CSEs let users concert their efforts in information retrieval activities, share information resources collaboratively using knowledge tags, and allow experts to guide less experienced...
  
   - Search Engines which actively or passively take user behavior into consideration in ranking results.
• OpenSearch
  OpenSearch
  OpenSearch is a collection of technologies that allow publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation. It is a way for websites and search engines to publish search results in a standard and accessible format....
  
   - A standard protocol for publishing search results in a consumable format.

External links

• Seeking help with Seeks, P2Pnet, August 2010.
• Google ? Scroogle ? or Seeks?, P2Pnet, July 2010.
• Seeks delivers new search engine paradigm, Sourceforge's blog, June 2010.
• Seeks Project: Let's take back Websearch, FOSDEM
  FOSDEM
  FOSDEM is a non-commercial volunteer organized European event centered around free and open source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open source software movement...
  
  , 2011.