Create personal Web index

Sixearch automatically creates a Web index based on the user's bookmark file and Web search history during installation. Afterward, Sixearch will update the index by periodically adding new bookmarks or search history.

Users can also manually create or add to the personal index by:
(A) running a best-N-first 1 topical crawler, which crawls the Web in a more focused way guided by a provided topic. The crawling results will then be indexed for keyword searching.
To create a personal Web index for searching and sharing, users need to provide the following mandatory or optional information:
  1. Personal bookmarks file (currently only working for FireFox bookmarks2) (optional).
    • Windows XP users: You can find your FireFox bookmarks file in C:\Documents and Settings\Your log in name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxx\bookmarks.html
    • Linux/Unix users: You can find your FireFox bookmarks file in /home/Your log in name/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxx/bookmarks.html
    • Mac users: You can find your FireFox bookmarks file in /Users/Your log in name/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxx/bookmarks.html

      • xxxxxxx will be a random directory name generated by Firefox when it was installed. It is different on every installation.

  2. Crawling topic (optional). This is a bunch of keywords describing your interests. You can enter any keywords you like. If no keyword is provided, Sixearch will do a general crawl.

  3. Number of Web pages to crawl. Go ahead and crawl a thousand or more, it will take only a few minutes.

(B) importing bookmarks from delicious or givealink.org

The Sixearch index management tool displays all the documents indexed by the local engine. For each indexed document, the user can assign tags, which are searchable by the local engine or modify existing tags. Users can also delete any document entries or remove the entire index.


1http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/fil/IS/JavaCrawlers/

2 Firefox 3 saves bookmarks in a JSON file so for two way compatibility with older Firefox there is one option in Firefox preferences which saves the bookmarks to bookmark.html file every time Firefox is closed. If the user is using Firefox3 then before starting the sixearch application user has to perform the following steps:

  1. Type about:config in the address bar of the Firefox browser.
  2. Type "bookmarks.auto" in the filter and then click on it to make the value true.
  3. Restart Firefox.