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People can have two types of experiences with Web search engines:

1. The Good: When you are searching for specific bits of information from the Web, like the location of your local Pizza Hut, or the Web site address of a specific company, or the phone number of your local dry cleaner -- chances are that the very first result brings forth exactly what you are looking for. Search engines have focused on these "transactional queries" and have tried to deliver the most relevant answer in the first hit in the result set. i.e. They have focused on bringing you instant gratification for a class of queries where that is possible.
2. The Not-so-good: On the other hand, when you are looking for information like college financial aid, or voip service providers, chances are that you will be faced with a very large set of results and will be spending a lot of time trying to make sense of it. No instant gratification here for "informational queries" like these.

Why does this problem exist?

• Searching for information is a process, but the most search engines don't support this process
• Information on the Web is not organized, and this makes it quite difficult to find useful information
• Search engines are one-size fits all tools and not personal
• They don't leverage knowledge from their users
• They don't let users leverage information from each other, even from those they trust

The Zakta Web search engine is designed to address these issues. It is a more robust Web search engine that can make searching for "informational queries" better than traditional alternatives.

Zakta is a personal search engine, first and foremost, because, unlike traditional Web search engines, you can completely personalize your search results.

• Don't like a result you see? Delete it.
• Don't like the result ordering? Drag-and-drop results as you see fit.
• Want to store a note with a result? Classify / tag / annotate a result in one click.
• Want to save a result for later use? Add it to the ClipPad.
• Need to stop searching and come back later? No problem! Your personalized changes are persisted automatically for you with no additional effort. You can come right back to where you left your search later on.

Zakta is also a social search engine, in many different ways.

• You can organize and share your findings on any topic in the form of user-created guides.
• You can collaborate with people you trust in researching a topic and creating guides.
• You can let users not only view and benefit from your guides, but vote on them, comment on them, tag them and even contribute to them.
• You can leverage guides created by others in topics of your interest and connect to them to benefit from what they know

In addition, the Zakta search engine adapts itself at two ends of the social spectrum:

• On the one end, at an individual's level, the Zakta search engine is also built on top of a trust-based social network, allowing you to connect to people you trust. When you do this, Zakta automatically uses resources and results that have been recommended highly by people in your trust network to improve what is shown in your search results.
• On the other end, at a global level, the Zakta search engine continuously learns about people's preferences for resources on different topics and adapts the default search results automatically, thereby improving the user experience at all times.

At its simplest level, the Zakta Web Search engine works like a regular search engine, in that, all you need to do is enter your terms and click "Find" to start searching.

• If you enter multiple terms for your query, the search engine will automatically return only results that match ALL the terms provided.
• To search for a phrase, put your terms within double-quotes. Example: "Nikola Tesla" will find articles that only match the phrase Nikola Tesla.
• You can use plus (+) and minus (-) signs before terms to require including them or excluding them. Example: "Nikola Tesla" +electricity will find articles that match both the phrase Nikola Tesla and the word electricity. Whereas, "Nikola Tesla" -electricity will find articles that match the phrase Nikola Tesla but do not contain the word electricity in them.
• Searches are not case-sensitive. So, the query wireless transmission will produce the same result set as the query Wireless Transmission.

By default, your queries are targeted at all available sources of information, though you can easily target your search to only a specific source if you wish -- this is covered in the next section.

Zakta searches across a range of information sources to present a universal search results page for your query. Zakta also uses built-in knowledge of over 3-million topics of information (in English), and more detailed knowledge of information in about 100 categories to deliver more organized search results for your query.

Here are the key parts to the Zakta search result page:

• Did you Mean? This is shown right below the search box, when the query you've entered is ambiguous. It suggests possible meanings of the term you've searched for, so you can tell the Zakta search engine which meaning of the term you meant to search for.
• Related This is shown when Zakta has some knowledge about your query and what topics may be related to it. The intent is to let you explore the area around your query easily by following the suggestions given.
• Zakta Guides Zakta Guides are created by Zakta members, sharing what they find useful on a given topic from the Web, or sharing their knowledge of expertise on a given topic. If there is a relevant Zakta Guide matching your query, that is placed on top of the search result page, to give you the opportunity to use what someone else in Zakta published on that topic.
• Zakta Organized Results, OR, Regular Web Site Results If your query is in one of the 100 categories that Zakta has deep knowledge on, like Diseases, Drugs, Actors, Films etc., or if your query matches one of the 3 million topics on which Zakta has some knowledge on, then Zakta presents a "table of contents" for your search result, composed of subtopics you might want to see results. Simply click on a link in this "table of contents" to jump to the section on this search result page corresponding to it, and see the results right there for that subtopic. Where Zakta has no knowledge to augment your query, it will deliver matching Web sites and page directly like a traditional Web search engine would.
• Result sections Zakta organizes results into sections wherever possible, on a single search result page. Sections can correspond to specific sources of information that Zakta searches for, in parallel, or can correspond to a subtopic associated with your query.

Here are the sources of information that Zakta currently searches to deliver your search results:

• Web Sites Zakta delivers relevant Web sites and pages matching your query, in a section called "Web Sites"
• Wikipedia Zakta delivers relevant Wikipedia articles in a section called "Reference", because those highly relevant matching Wikipedia articles can be useful starting points for your search
• Zakta Guides Zakta has a growing collection of user-created Zakta Guides, from which it delivers highly relevant Zakta Guides that match your query
• Educational Zakta has a collection of hand-picked Web Sites with excellent trusted content in various subject areas. Since these are of high educational value, Zakta delivers matching sites and pages from this collection in a section called "Educational" in the search results page

We plan to offer searching across even more sources in the coming months.

Sometimes, the query terms you use may be ambiguous, i.e. they may mean different things in different contexts.
Consider a search for the query reagan. The results can include different types of resources: a) Ronald Reagan, b) Other members of the Reagan family like Nancy Reagan, Michael Reagan etc., c) famous landmarks named after Reagan etc. i.e. The term Reagan is ambiguous and can mean different things.

Zakta offers an excellent solution to this through the "Did you Mean?" prompt.
Zakta offers an exhaustive set of possible contexts like "Ronald Reagan | Nancy Reagan | Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport | John Henninger Reagan | Ronald Reagan Presidential Library | Michael Reagan | USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) | Ron Reagan | Maureen Reagan | Ronald Reagan Freedom Award | The Reagan Diaries | Reagan, Indiana" etc. You can click on the context/interpretation suitable to you to get targeted results.

Where Zakta has knowledge for your query, it shows a "Related" set of topics for you to explore.

On a query for "Ronald Reagan", Zakta suggests "Reaganomics | Governor of California | United States presidential election, 1984 | United States presidential election, 1976 | United States presidential election, 1980 | Iran-Contra affair | Mikhail Gorbachev | Republican Party (United States) | 1989 | Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's letter | That Printer of Udell's | A Time for Choosing" etc. a topics related to President Ronald Reagan. These suggestions can be very useful in targeting additional areas of exploration around your original query.

Highly relevant Zakta Guides matching your query are shown first in the search result set. With each Zakta Guide, a small image corresponding to the Guide, the title of the Guide and its author are shown. Simply click on a Guide's title to view it and interact with it.

A well-authored Zakta Guide on a topic can be an excellent, organized, starting point to explore the Web on that topic.

The Zakta Organized Results portion is shown when Zakta has knowledge about your query, which it can use to organize the search results into meaningful sections for your query. Think of this as presenting a "Table of Contents" for navigating the results for your query, so that you can explore the subtopics meaningful to your query easily from the same page. Each subtopic section is shown as a hyperlink here. Simply click on the link to the subtopic section you want, and Zakta will show you that section, and fetch more results from the Web if needed to show it in place.

Zakta organizes search results into sections whenever possible. These sections can correspond to one of the sources of information that Zakta searches in parallel, or to subtopics related to your query.

Each section has the title of the section in the header area. It has a link to "See detail", which will show more detail for each search result in that section. It also has a link "Back to top", which will jump back to the top of the search results. At the bottom of each section, if there are more results available, a "More" link is shown. When you click on "More", Zakta will fill in more results right in place in this page.

Zakta also supports a set of advanced query operators.

• link: Find all pages that link to a particular URL.
  Example: link:http://cnn.com/
  
  
• site: Find all pages within a particular web site (a domain and all its subdomains).
  Example: site:zakta.com
  
  
• inurl: Find all pages where given keyword matches part of the URL.
  Example: inurl:blog
  
  
• intitle: Find all pages where given keyword matches part of the Title attribute of those pages.
  Example: intitle:forum
  
  

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