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You can personalize your search results in Zakta. Unlike a traditional Web search engine that gives you a search result page that you cannot do anything with (except, of course, to read and use it), that you cannot control, Zakta’s search results page is entirely editable by you. You can delete search results you deem irrelevant, reorder search results the way you see fit, annotate / tag search results etc. and have it all be saved for you in your Zakta account, ready for you to use later on easily. There is no more need to waste time running the same searches over and over again and going through all the motions of ignoring things you found irrelevant or uninteresting – with Zakta, Web search is now “personal”, controlled by you as you see fit.
Zakta also has a powerful way for you to share your search results with others, in the form of a Zakta Guide. A Zakta Guide is a living document containing the best search results or information on any topic, organized the way that you personally see fit. It is also a collaborative tool, permitting you to invite others you trust to co-edit the Guide with you. Zakta enables you to generate a starter Guide from search results quite easily.
Sometimes it is difficult to find information on the topic that you are searching with just one query. You probably can relate to the times where you’ve reworded your query a few different ways, or have explored certain subtopics deeper – in all these occasions, you find interesting and relevant resources sprinkled across various searches. Zakta has the perfect tool called the ClipPad, that is tailormade to help you preserve in one place, what you find useful on a topic from different queries and search results pages.
These powerful tools are quite easy to use, and the details are below.
We sometimes refer to Zakta as a read-write search engine, because you can edit and write back search results as you see fit.
One of the common artifacts in searching the Web is that you find results that are not useful to you. In Zakta, you can move your mouse over the result you want to delete. The result is highlighted with a gray background, and a set of icons appear on the right side of the result record. One of those icons is a “X” icon for deleting the result.
NOTE: The change is saved automatically for you on Zakta. If you leave this search and come back to it later, you will be able to continue with your results as you left it. It is indeed this easy!
When looking at a result set, each of us finds some results more useful than others. Quite often, the results presented by a search engine aren’t in the order we think they should have been. In Zakta, you can put the results in exactly the order you desire. When you move the mouse over a result, one of the icons is a drag icon. Click on this icon and hold and drag, and you will see the result moving with your mouse. Just drag and drop it where you want it.
Reordering results is really as easy as drag-and-drop! Your changes are automatically saved for you.
You can tag or annotate a result with your own comments and refer back to it later.
When searching the Web for information, we often encounter a mix of different types of results, news stories listed side by side with user reviews, shopping site information thrown in with official company pages. This lack of organization is one of those things that makes finding useful information so much more complex than it needs to be. In Zakta, you can actually classify a result as a News Story, a User Review, a Shopping Site, etc. with ease.
To use these features, just hover over the search result record in question, and click on the ‘Edit this result’ link to open the form in which you can tag, annotate and classify the result.
NOTE: The classification, tagging and annotation of a result is optional. You can set any one or more of these, as you see fit with your own process of finding and managing information. One more way in which Zakta’s search engine is “personal”.
Traditional Web search engines do not let users benefit from each other, even from people they trust. In Zakta, searching is not just a very personal experience as all these personalization features demonstrate. Searching and finding information, in Zakta is also very social. One of the ways in which users can benefit from others they trust is through the pervasive “Recommendation” feature.
In your search results, as you move your mouse over a search result, one of the set of icons that show up is a green “thumbs-up” icon. Click on this to Recommend this result.
A recommended result will have a green thumbs-up icon to the left of it as shown above. But more importantly, this recommendation is automatically sent to your social network. People who are connected to you automatically receive a “Happening” indicating that you’ve made a recommendation. And people who have established that they trust you on the subject of your recommendation (the Subject “Music”, in this example above), will have this recommendation delivered to them in a highlighted way to make it stand out for them above all other recommendations they might be receiving from others in their network. Soon, Zakta will be leveraging recommended results from your trust-network on Zakta to present better search results to you in the first place. A simple act of recommendation goes a long way to help your network on Zakta discover useful things you have found, and likewise, you will benefit from recommendations made by others in your network that you trust.
A Guide, in Zakta, organizes the best information from the Web on a given topic. Guides are created, published and shared by Zakta users. Users can find Guides created by others, view them, comment on them, recommend them, subscribe to them (to keep on top of changes made to the Guide), and if the Guide creator permits it, contribute to the Guide or even co-edit the Guide. A Guide organizes information in the form of a series of “sections”. Each “section” can address one aspect of the topic of the Guide. sourcecount
For a large number of topics in English, Zakta makes it easy to automatically create a Guide from the search process by suggesting topics you could include as sections in your Guide. Creating a Guide from the search results page is as simple as clicking the “Share these results” button on the search result page, choosing the topics you want to include in your Guide, and clicking on “Create New Guide”. A draft Guide will be created for you and opened in the Zakta Guide Editor for you to edit and enhance and publish. In those instances where Zakta doesn’t have suggestions for topics to include in your Guide, you can still create a Guide with basic sections, and then use the Zakta Guide Editor to make the guide richer. sourcecount
Alternatively, if you are an expert on the topic of the Guide you want to create, and very good at constructing good search queries, you can use the Expert Guide Creator tool. The Expert Guide Creator is a powerful tool to create a Guide quickly using focused search queries for the subtopics/sections you want to have in the Guide. sourcecountRemember that a Zakta Guide is organized in the form of sections. Each section, in turn, contains appropriate resources for the subtopic of that section. The Expert Guide Creator can be used to create a Guide very quickly by specifying exactly the sections you want, and how to fill in the best resources into those sections by querying the Web. sourcecountYou can delete sections, add new ones, drag-and-drop to reorder them, and when you are ready, just click “Create New Guide” to get a Guide as specified. The new Guide will be opened in the guide editor as an unpublished guide, where you can edit it or enhance it further and publish it and share it. sourcecountThe Expert Guide Creator is best suited for someone who is adept at formulating good Web queries, and has good knowledge of the topic on which the Guide needs to be created, and in these cases, it is the fastest path to creating a Guide on a topic.sourcecount
NOTE: You can personalize your results in Zakta as you wish, and then proceed to create a Guide. Your changes are preserved and transferred into the Guide appropriately. So, if you deleted two top Web Sites results, and dragged and dropped a result from 10th place to 1st place, then when you create a Guide from these results, your result editing and ordering are preserved.
The ClipPad is an integrated tool to help you save interesting finds during the search / research process instantly. sourcecountThe ClipPad is made of one or more sections each containing one or more items you wish to save. An item, in turn, is a pointer to a web site, web page, Wikipedia article, news item, image, video etc. — i.e. you can add to the ClipPad as an item anything you find interesting on the Web. Search results found directly from the search process can be added by clicking on the Add to ClipPad icon next to that item. Items found using other search engines or by browsing the Web can also be saved in the ClipPad by using the Add Item dialog in the ClipPad.sourcecount
You can manually add an item to the ClipPad using the “Add Item” from the ClipPad menu.
In the Add ClipPad Item dialog, items that are pointers to web resources like web sites, web pages, images etc. all require the Title and URL fields to be filled in. You can add an optional Annotation to describe the item if you wish. If you wish to store a fragment of text in the ClipPad, you can also do that, by using the Add Item dialog and providing a Title and storing your text in the Annotation, and leaving the URL empty in the process. Any items you add to the ClipPad using any of the methods above will all be saved automatically for you and will be available the next time you log back in as well, from any computer. No need to fear losing interesting and important finds in the search/research process anymore!
You can use ClipPad sections to further organize your online finds. Choose “Add Section” within the ClipPad to create a new section within it.
The ClipPad supports pervasive drag-and-drop functionality to enable you to rapidly organize items and sections. sourcecountYou can drag-and-drop sections to reorder them. You can drag-and-drop items inside or across sections to rearrange them. sourcecount
NOTE: When a Guide is displayed, you can open the ClipPad simultaneously, drag an item or section from the Guide into the ClipPad to save it. You can also do the reverse — drag and item or section from the ClipPad to a Guide you are editing/creating. sourcecount
If you save items into the ClipPad, you can create a draft Guide with those items in one click. Simply click on “Create Guide from ClipPad” to create a draft / unpublished Guide in the Guide Editor, from where you can edit it easily and publish it.
Though the ClipPad is integrated with the search process for faster addition of interesting items during the research process, you can add items to it at any time during your extended research process using other search engines, databases and web sites. Use it as a place to collect interesting things before transforming its contents into a guide! sourcecount
You can even save items to the ClipPad when you are browsing the Web — see the Zakta Plugin for Firefox for more information.
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