Browsing by Author "Marques, Artur"
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- An app for personal searches:more-private, non-volatile searches with stigmergic inspirationPublication . Marques, ArturWeb searching has long become a ubiquitous behavior amongst Internet users. Much has been changing: odds are that the thousands of results of yesterday have become millions of results today, but did that significant jump in quantity translate to an increase in the perceived results' quality and their applications? Some users might feel personalization efforts as stereotypification or even as inaccurate biases; they may also beware that every click on every search result may reinforce and contribute to (in)accurate representation of them - and would prefer searching without tracking. "Personal Searcher" is a work-in-progress app that makes it possible to search more anonymously. It also makes it possible to keep a private local-only history of one's searches and build personal ranking systems based on that history and other data. The goal is to benefit from local offline personalization, but search online as anonymously as possible.
- An approach to decentralizing search, using stigmergic hyperlinksPublication . Marques, Artur; Figueiredo, JoséA stigmergic hyperlink, or “stigh”, is an object that looks and behaves like a regular HTML hyperlink, but runs at the server side. A system of stighs displays interesting emergent behaviors, of some complexity, but a stigh alone is very simple: it has a life attribute, only reinforced when users click it, and methods to provide meta-information about its destination. We reason that stigmergic hyperlinks could support a more decentralized approach to the Web search problem, particularly for addressing the “Deep Web”, which we consider all the WWW that is uncharted by search engines. We discuss vertical and horizontal solutions for the “Deep Web” and present a specialized system that makes searchable the publications hiding at the biggest Portuguese digital magazines site. The index that the system builds, feeds the search related methods of a stigmergic hyperlink linking to that destination. Our contributions are, to make the case for a broader “Deep Web” concept, that goes beyond databases hiding behind HTML forms; describe an approach that could decentralized Web search, based on stigmergic hyperlinks and a supporting business model; and to exemplify one specialized system that enables searching the biggest Portuguese digital magazines website.
- CCPB a system for filtered news hoarding and automatic private publishing:CCPB a device for the marketplace of attentionPublication . Marques, ArturWe live in a "marketplace of attention" constantly facing the truism of "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention". Many people are increasingly aware of a growing number of worthy-of-their-time content sources, happenings, events, etc., but it is not only becoming harder to consume them all, but also selecting in itself has reached a level of complexity that may cause frustration. "CCPB" (Consumer, Capturer, Publisher Bot) is a work-in-progress system that enables users to automatically capture configurable content from WWW sources (e.g. nytimes.com, wsj.com, ft.com, etc.) and have it privately published for later reading. Publication is done in a private local blog. Once captured, the content can be consumed and searched offline. Some common paywall systems might be automatically defeated by the bot's consumption algorithms. The user can configure what to accept and what to reject via regular expressions.CCPB works as personal device for the "marketplace of attention", running on behalf of its user, always harvesting and publishing what's new, for asynchronous consumption, regardless of online availability.
- On the evolution of hyperlinkingPublication . Marques, ArturAcross time, the hyperlink object has supported different applications and studies. This is one perspective on the evolution of the hyperlinking concept, its context and related behaviors. Through a spectrum of hyperlinking applications and practices, the article contrasts the status quo with its related, broader, conceptual roots; it also bridges to some theorized and prototyped hyperlink variations, namely "stigmergic hyperlinks", to make the case that the ubiquitousness of some objects and certain usage patterns can obfuscate opportunities to (re)think them. In trying to contribute an answer to "what has the common hyperlink (such an apparently simple object) done to society, and what has society done to it?", the article identifies situations that have become so embedded in the daily routine, that it is now hard to think of hyperlinking alternatives.
- Stigmergic hyperlink's contributes to web searchPublication . Marques, ArturStigmergic hyperlinks are hyperlinks with a "heart beat": if used they stay healthy and online; if neglected, they fade, eventually getting replaced. Their life attribute is a relative usage measure that regular hyperlinks do not provide, hence PageRank-like measures have historically been well informed about the structure of webs of documents, but unaware of what users effectively do with the links. This paper elaborates on how to input the users’ perspective into Google’s original, structure centric, PageRank metric. The discussion then bridges to the Deep Web, some search challenges, and how stigmergic hyperlinks could help decentralize the search experience, facilitating user generated search solutions and supporting new related business models.
- Stigmergic hyperlink:a new social web objectPublication . Marques, Artur; Figueiredo, JoséInspired by patterns of behavior generated in social networks, a prototype of a new object was designed and developed for the World Wide Web – the stigmergic hyperlink or “stigh”. In a system of stighs, like a Web page, the objects that users do use grow “healthier”, while the unused “weaken”, eventually to the extreme of their “death”, being autopoieticaly replaced by new destinations. At the single Web page scale, these systems perform like recommendation systems and embody an “ecological” treatment to unappreciated links. On the much wider scale of generalized usage, because each stigh has a method to retrieve information about its destination, Web agents in general and search engines in particular, would have the option to delegate the crawling and/or the parsing of the destination. This would be an interesting social change: after becoming not only consumers, but also content producers, Web users would, just by hosting (automatic) stighs, become information service providers too.