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*** 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

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