Web Search

Users can use either the Sixearch Web UI or the Sixsearch FireFox Extension to search the Web from your FireFox browser. The Firefox extension allows tighter integration with the Firefox browser. To search, a user can select the Sixearch option from the search box of the browser and type in a query as shown in figure (a).In addition, the user can quickly access the application’s management Web page or view a live snapshot of the Sixearch.org query network by clicking on the Sixearch logo at the bottom right of the browser as shown in figure (b). To use the Firefox extension, the Sixearch application must be running as a background process.


When a user submits a query, in addition to getting results from the local engine, Sixearch automatically determines which peers are best suited to answer the query based on its previous query-response experience, and forwards the query to those peers. The results coming from the local engine and other peers' will then be shown on the browser along with the usual information like in any traditional search engine (title, snippet, etc), as well as information about the peers that provided results.


The query and answers received from each peer are analyzed and used to update local knowledge about what that peer has in its search engine index. This knowledge is then used to select peers for future queries.

Furthermore, with the local search option checked, the user's query will only be matched on the local search engine. In an analogous way, with the Yahoo1 search option checked, the user's query will be sent to the Yahoo search engine as well. But the results coming from Yahoo will be displayed in a separated tabbed panel for the user's reference.

1http://www.yahoo.com