Searchmaze Infosphere
One of the biggest time-wasters online is trying to find that webpage you saw yesterday,
the one with the great offer on it, that piece of invaluable information or whatever, but
you can't remeber the address .... all you have is the fragments in your brain.
Think about it. How many times have you spent time trying find back information you have
seen before ? Using the history folder in your browser sometimes works, favorites and
bookmarks easily become useless if you have too many of them.
The Searchmaze solution to this problem is simple. We build a personal search engine for you,
a search engine that only contains pages you've visited before. Any keyword fragment
or phrase left in your brian will be enough to immediately retreive the correct page, at the top of
your result screen.
We all use the internet for different purposes and we all visit different sites and pages.
What we have in common (and what research shows) is that we usually have a quite limited
number of different website we actually use and value. Once we find and get used to a
certain information source, most people tend to go back to that source, rather than
look for a new one.
You could say we all have a information bubble that surrounds us, being the internet we know about.
This bubble or cloud is what searchmaze calles an infosphere.
Searchmaze helps you make more effective
use of this info bubble because it automatically remebers what you've seen, makes those pages searchable and ranks
them accoring to your usage of the resulting sites. Also, it creates automatically updating favorite lists on your
start page and in the "My Sites" menu of the browser extension toolbar.
How it works
The Searchmaze Toolbar contains a button that allows you to Turn on Infosphere logging. When this feature in turned on
(it is by default), the URLs you visit are sent to the Searchmaze server that contains your infosphere. Every 15 minutes a
crawler-bot wakes up and indexes any new URLs you have visited, so you can find them in your infosphere search engine.
Unlike history folders, other desktop search or personal search solutions, Searchmaze does not slow down your PC or eat your
disk space, all crawling and data storage is done on the Searchmaze servers, allowing you to access your infosphere from anywhere.
Seachmaze currently does NOT index any documents on your harddisk, it does not index your email or chat sessions. We think these results would
dilute the relevancy of your infophere as we feel this information is usually of a different type and thus searched differently, in a seperate session.
If you disagree, please let us know !
Your Privacy
We take the privacy of Searchmaze users very serious. The first step in protecting your
privacy is that Searchmaze does not, in any way, use personally identifiable data (like your email adress, if you choose to provide it)
for any other means than communicating with our users on issues related to our service. The information is never
sold, shared or made available to any third party under any circumstances. Only under
a direct order by an official court ruling governed by the laws of the Neherlands would Searchmaze
surender any information. (the Netherlands has one of the best privacy protection laws in the world).
Even then, we have built our systems in such a way that there is no personally
identifiable link between collected usage data and individual users personal account information.
It's just anonymous data. Only you hold the key to unlock your information (see Security below).
Any advertising (which is what we hope to make our money on) will always be relevant and non-intrusive,
all Ads are genrated by automactic targetting systems, there are never any humans involved nor is
there ever an attempt to link usage data to personalally identifiable information (such as your name or address).
What gets indexed in my infosphere and what doesn't ?
The Searchmaze crawler bot respects the rotbots.txt protocol. This means it will not index any pages that a webmaster does not want indexed by
search engines. Searchmaze also does not index secure servers (https) or pages that require user authorization.
Other that that, it will index every page you visit (as long as infosphere logging is enabled).
Most redirect pages, Error Pages or bad links are automatically cleaned from your index from time to time.
If you want to remove certain pages in your infoshpere, you can delete them manually from the result screens.
You can select to share your infosphere data (enabled by default) with the collective Searchmaze infosphere search engine.
This does not mean others can search your personal infosphere, it just means that your cumulative data is added to the
combined database. Combined usage data (i.e. all searchmaze users visited CNN.com X times during X time etc)
in no way compromises your privacy and is used for ranking and relevancy purposes in the general searchmaze
search engine (still under development).
Again, if there are pages you do not want in your infosphere you can delete then (your data on this url will
also be removed from the combined infosphere). Or you can turn off logging completely when you are sufing
sites that you do not want indexed.
Your Security
Searchmaze makes every effort to keep the information on our servers secured from theft or disruption,
although we cannot guarantee 100% security, no one can.
That is why we also make an effort to minimize risks to your privacy by avoiding any link between
personally identifiable information (such as your name or email address) and any collected usage data.
Your personal start page and infosphere search engine are stored under an random ID string and locked with an
encrypted password. The information can only be viewed by providing the correct one way encrypted password.
The original password is known only to you and is not stored on searchmaze servers. This means that even if
someone would be able to unlawfully access information on our servers, there would be no way to know who's data it is,
redering the data useless for anything that could impact your privacy, commercial or otherwise.
Please Note: Some of the security measures are still in development and should be in place by next weekend (1st week of May)
