Q:

A:

aa-1

“Why does the world need another search engine?”

It doesn’t need one.  But SetSee is NOT a “search engine”; it doesn’t search the Web for content.  Its focus [pun intended]  is very much smaller, just the lengthy text content currently displayed on your computer monitor. However, SetSee does use the basic tool of computerized search—Boolean algebra operations on a set of items—to address the problem of finding just the text information you want, when the software you are using is displaying too much content on your screen and your only options until now have been the software’s scroll bar or its find command.  SetSee lets you “focus” on just the text you want to see.

Q:

A:

aa-2

“If it’s not a search engine, what is it?”

Instead of “search engine,” you can think of SetSee as a software user interface technique:  a “displayed content filtering tool” that is a “useful supplement to the scroll bar” and a powerful “alternative to application-specific find commands.”   As one tagline for SetSee says, “Not all searches are web searches” which is just a way of saying that there are other kinds of searches that people do besides Web searches, and there have been for a long time—computer database searching for 60+ years and the “physical” searching we have done for centuries with long printed material, using our eyes and fingers.  SetSee helps a lot with the electronic form of the latter, the information that is displayed on our electronic screens.

SetSee does do “searching” in the sense that it makes use of the 3 Boolean algebra operators AND, OR, and NOT to bring more power to the task of finding just the information you want within a long piece of text displayed on your screen.  Boolean algebra is at the heart of all searching, so we think it should be used to find text in long displays of it.  (Do you remember studying Venn diagrams in school?  A pictorial expression of Boolean algebra at work.)

Q:

A:

-3

“How do you expect to compete with Google?”

SetSee is not trying to compete with Google (really, David-2 vs. Goliath4?). Rather, it addresses a problem that Google search (or any Web search engine) does not help with. Google searches billions of Web pages to find content that—in some way, as there is much involved in the Google search algorithm—matches your search criteria.  But SetSee is only concerned with the text that exists within scores or hundreds of similar clumps that appear on your screen on a single Web page or other display of text: lists of all kinds, tables, directory entries, paragraphs in articles/books/briefs/papers, database search results, spreadsheet rows, etc.  

Q:

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aa-4

“Why do we need it?  What problems does it solve?”

You don’t need SetSee, but it can be very helpful at times, and often fun.  It solves “a problem that most people do not even know they have.”  That problem is that, even after finding a Web page that probably has the information they want, people have trouble finding that desired information on the page: either the page is too long, or the different pieces of information are too far apart on the page and they need to see them together.  More specifically, the find command provided in the browser is too weak to be very helpful in many situations, and the scroll bar can be of marginal help when looking for text within the displayed information.  By providing the ability to do the Boolean operations of AND, OR, and NOT in a very simple way on the text within the page, SetSee brings more power to the problem, such as finding multiple words at once.

We like to remind people that no one knew they needed Velcro® or Post-It® Notes.   But both of those products are nifty and very useful, and have been for decades now, and most of us would miss them if “the Universe” took them away.  We believe SetSee tools for finding information on electronic display could be as useful.

Q:

A:

aa-5

“Can’t I just use Google to do what SetSee does?”

You can try, but good luck. For example, it’s not easy with any Web search tool to answer questions like “What parts of the US Constitution contain both the words xxx and yyy?”  Or  “In that wonderful novella you told me about, when do Emma and Patrick first meet?”  Or  “Do any professors in my EECS graduate program have research interests in both robotics and human-computer interaction (HCI)?”   Or   “In that Wikipedia page with 500+ table entries, can you show me the 10 or so entries, right next to each other, for all the Central American countries?   With SetSee, it is easy to do these “searches.”

The Google search algorithm has changed a lot over the past 20 years and now tries many sophisticated ways to get you the information you want.  But for some “small” types of searches we do, it’s overkill and still doesn’t work. (In the 1970s, when green energy was a fringe activity, Amory Lovins had a wonderful quote about using nuclear reactors to generate electricity that was used to heat homes with baseboard heat:  It’s like cutting butter with a chainsaw.  SetSee is the simpler alternative to the “chainsaw” of web search for some information-finding needs).

Q:

A:

aa-6

“Does SetSee use AI technology?”

Uh, no.  It’s 1000 times simpler than a typical Web search engine, let alone AI.

Q:

A:

aa-24

“Why do you compare SetSee to Velcro and Post-It notes?”

Those 2 products are physical products and SetSee is software, so of course they are different.  But they are all similar because none of them are rocket science— just helpful, nifty, simple tools for dealing with little minor problems we run into daily. (And Velcro and Post-It notes, and their derivative products, are both $2 billion markets.)

Q:

A:

aa-7

“How does SetSee summarize the contents of the page I am viewing?”

SetSee does not do any summarization of the page.  It simply filters out the text pieces that get in the way of your seeing just the information that you want to see.

Q:

A:

aa-8

“Does it help me find just the parts I care about in all the pages linked to from the page I am viewing?”

No, SetSee does not help with that.  It only works with the currently displayed page.

Q:

A:

aa-9

“Does it search other pages on the same website to which my current page belongs?”

No, it does not search for Web pages, anywhere, just for text within the single Web page currently displayed.

Q:

A:

aa-10

“Do you have a concise summary or overview of what it does?”

SetSee is a software user interface technique that supplements the scrollbar and various “find” commands in the software used to display textual content on electronic screens, improving the user experience and satisfaction of people looking for information within long displays of content.   It lets you dynamically and temporarily shrink the content that is currently displayed in the window on your screen—to help you find just the information you want within that content—by temporarily removing text that is not of interest to you. It is more useful than the scrollbar and more powerful than any application find command.

Q:

A:

aa-11

“I heard there are 2 SetSee products; how are they different?”

Yes, there are 2 products, and the initial SetSee products both run in a browser window.  The first, called the Personal Edition, is a browser extension that you must install in your browser—it allows you to try to use SetSee on any Web page that you visit.  The second product allows organizations that publish websites to offer SetSee functionality on pages within their website—by including a single line of HTML (that fetches SetSee functionality from the cloud) in the source of the Web page—so that any visitor to that page can use it to filter the page.  The user does not need to install anything, as SetSee functionality is embedded in the page and the panel appears as soon as the page is loaded into the browser.  The demo pages that can give you some experience actually using SetSee—without installing anything—use the Publisher Edition.

Initially, the Personal Edition only works for the Chrome browser, but other browsers will be added later in 2023.  Web pages enabled with the Publisher Edition should work when visited with any browser, like Edge, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave (and they can be visited from smartphone browsers and be somewhat usable on such small screens).

Q:

A:

aa-12

“Does SetSee only work in a browser?”

In its first public release, the SetSee software only works in a browser (and just Chrome initially, for the Personal Edition).  But the idea and the method it employs could be used on any electronically displayed text in many other applications on your PC (various OS utilities, general apps, PDF readers) as well as in ebook readers, TV set-top boxes, public kiosk information displays, etc.  We of course think it should and will be.

If you want to use the Personal Edition, which is a browser extension that you install in your version of Chrome and use on pages you visit, see this doc.  If you want to “embed” SetSee in a web page of yours so that anyone visiting the page can use it on your page, see this doc.

Q:

A:

aa-13

“Does SetSee only work on a PC (Mac, Linux machine)?”

The SetSee Personal Edition MVP product (the current one) is a browser extension that works initially only in the Chrome browser, on all platforms where Chrome works and allows extensions—so not on smartphones or tablets.  In the next major release, SetSee will have extensions for other browsers.

Web pages enabled with the Publisher Edition are not using a browser extension and so the SetSee functionality works in any browser, on any device, including tablets and smartphones.  Note, though, that given that SetSee is based on textual input and keyboards, the limited screen size makes it of marginal use when viewing Published Edition-enabled pages on tablets and barely useful on most smartphones.  

SetSee is most usable and enjoyable on large screens (especially when they are in portrait/vertical orientation).  We’ve used a 27” monitor for years, mostly in portrait mode, which is more conducive to the reading-, writing- and research-centric PC work we do.  The greatest initial use of SetSee will probably be information workers of various types, academics, spreadsheet jocks, nerds, maybe lawyers, and people who love nifty tools, but we believe it has the potential to become a standard UX mechanism for handling long content.

Q:

A:

aa-14

“How small of a set can SetSee search?”

SetSee filters the text content that is currently displayed on your PC monitor to make it easier for you to find the specific information therein that you want.  In general, most people can visually find something easily in a bullet list or table of 20-25 items, but an article with 25 paragraphs or a photo directory of speakers at a conference is typically a little harder to visually scan, so the lower limit depends on the content type  By default, SetSee will identify any content of 25 or more items as a region it can filter, but this limit can be reduced (or increased) by the user in the Personal Edition, via the Preferences page.  Note, though, that making the limit as low as 5 or 10 is rather pointless.

This FAQ is structured as a table, with one Question/Answer pair per row of the table, and it has about 30 rows. Filtering it with SetSee helps a lot when using the FAQ, so we use the Publisher Edition to enable SetSee filtering on it for anyone visiting the page.

Q:

A:

aa-15

“How large of a set can SetSee search?”

The upper limit depends on various factors.  What is the largest table, bullet list, or article that you have seen as a web page?  If a PC is fast enough to display a list of 1,000 items, then it is probably fast enough for SetSee to easily filter that list.  One of our demo pages has over 900 items in a list, and a long story has 150+ paragraphs.  No performance engineering has been done on the current product and yet both of these demo pages work fine on a basic 2021 PC (Intel i5 CPU, 32 GB of RAM).

Many user interfaces use pagination techniques to break larger sets of text into multiple pages with a preset or user-chosen number of items and require the user to click on some kind of “next” button to load the next subset of items; unfortunately, SetSee cannot filter the next set of items that the page developer has not put on the current page.  And in recent years, many page designs incorporate infinite scrolling to dynamically lengthen the page when a user reaches the bottom of what is currently displayed.  SetSee offers an alternative to both of these UI design techniques.  And usually, on a page that works with the Personal Edition, if the page uses infinite scrolling and you invoke it by scrolling to the end of the page, SetSee will still work on the larger page.

Q:

A:

aa-16

“Can I see how it works, without installing anything?”
“Can I try it myself?”

Yes, of course.  The demo page has links to about 10 pages that you can try SetSee on, as they all have been enabled with the snippet of the Publisher Edition.  Some of the pages are copies of copyright-free government Web pages or stories, and if you later install the Personal Edition (the browser extension), you can use it on the original page (links to the originals are provided), should you want to.

Q:

A:

aa-16

Do I need an account or login to use SetSee?

No, not for now or ever for the free product.  The initial public release of SetSee is free, for both the Personal Edition and the Publisher Edition.  Future releases with more features will be in premium packages that will require an account and login.

Q:

A:

aa-17

“When I try SetSee at a demo page you point me to, the page shrinks to 5% of its size before I've had a chance to look at it.  What's going on?”

Some of the demo pages use a feature of SetSee called URL-encoded initial search.  This is a mechanism that allows one to code a URL of a page with SetSee-specific arguments that will cause—if the page is enabled with SetSee capability using the Publisher Edition or the user has SetSee Personal Edition installed—SetSee to start as soon as the page loads and to implement an initial search.  This will leave your scroll bar at the beginning of the field in the search panel so you can modify the search or just cancel it out (using the ESC key).

For example, this link starts SetSee on a page of almost 500 US Patent Office patent classes, with 2 initial search words, shrinking the list of terms to 4% of its original length.  Add the characters  ,digital  to the end of the search string and you will be adding a term to the Boolean OR, thus increasing the number of items that match; you can use the ESC key to clear the field and return the page to its base state.

Q:

A:

aa-18

“Could the use of SetSee replace the need for small databases?”

We believe that this could happen for those web interfaces to small databases and that it would be a lot easier for many people.   As PC power continues to increase, this will be even more attainable, and could probably save organizations money on UI development costs for the more complicated UI for such webpage search and access.

Q:

A:

aa-19

“Can SetSee be used to find information in a lengthy hierarchically structured document, like a user manual or a legal filing?”

It depends on the page.  One goal for the next major product release is to allow SetSee to filter hierarchically structured documents in a way that makes the user aware of the subsections of the structure that the matched items are a part of—basically, the headings of the document will be displayed either if they are a level-1 heading or if the heading’s text, or any its subsections’ text, contains matches,  The current MVP product cannot do this, but we believe that will be one of the best uses of SetSee for helping people find information more easily.  

Q:

A:

aa-20

“Can SetSee be used to search for words in the paragraphs of PDF files?”

The current product does not do this but we hope that we get to a point where such a capability is possible, as it would appeal to a lot of users.  It would be a future release at least a year away, as the engineering required is more complex.

Q:

A:

aa-21

“Can SetSee be used to search for words in plain text files?”

The current product does not do this but we plan to eventually provide such a capability.  Note, however, that SetSee can filter the contents of a directory on the PC when you use the full pathname of the directory in the address bar.

Q:

A:

aa-22

“You say you’ve simplified Boolean algebra syntax for the SetSee tool.  How?”

With traditional Boolean logic, the operations use the words AND, OR, and NOT as operators, and parentheses & rules of precedence; these are implemented in various ways in programming languages and database query languages, sometimes replacing the actual words with symbols like  & or | or double versions of those (&& and ||).  Google and other Web search engines simplified this a little by replacing the AND with a blank space and usually the NOT with the minus sign (‒) but kept the OR, even though it is not used much in Web searches.  The SetSee standardized simplified search syntax (“S5”) builds on this by using a punctuation symbol (the comma: , ) for the OR as well as a convention about precedence that makes it ideal for searching the “smaller” sets that SetSee is meant to work with.

The 4 rules a user need to know to use the SetSee search syntax are summarized in 4 points in the pop-up window that appears when the user hovers the mouse over the Help link in the SetSee search panel:

To give another example, the generic (e.g., query language) Boolean algebra syntax for a search that might be typical when using SetSee to search a large table would be

word1 AND word2 AND (wordA  OR  wordB   OR wordC )  NOT wordZZZ

whereas the equivalent S5 syntax is

word1 word2 wordA,wordB,wordC -wordZZZ

which also implicitly makes the OR operators take precedence, eliminating the parentheses.  In the example above, the generic syntax needs 13 letters and 2 parentheses to express the Boolean operators & precedence, whereas this is done with 3 blanks and 3 punctuation marks in the S5 syntax.

This syntax design is based on empirical experience searching smaller sets: with smaller sets, the typical search has the searcher thinking like this:

• maximizing the matches using OR (“Yeah, we want green, yellow, or red apples”)
• l imiting the matches using AND (“but just organic ones”)
• removing unwanted matches with NOT (“Well, let’s skip the ones from Sunkist”)

Hence, the implied precedence of the OR operations before the AND & NOT operations.

Finally, the comma was chosen because of its common use in writing or speaking a list of alternatives:  “Yes, green, yellow, or red apples are all fine!”).

Q:

A:

aa-23

“You use FAQ web pages a couple of times in your two documents  “Try It Yourself ” Demo Pages and Example/Good Web Pages to Learn SetSee On.  Why are FAQs so interesting?”

We think SetSee could be of major value as the user interface for all kinds of FAQs.  Most FAQs on the web that we encounter suffer from 3 main problems:

• Many of them require constant clicking of the mouse, to either open up a closed answer already on the page (usually done by clicking on a + character) or to follow a link to just one or 2 sentences, and then another link, and then another, and then…  This is too much mousework for some people and a waste of time.
• Most FAQs are far too short and only answer the most common questions of the least experienced of the users of the software or system in question, like How do I reset my password?  Serious and experienced users of such products often need questions answered too, and having a FAQ of, say, 200-500 items might actually be quite helpful to those customers.
• The alternatives to FAQs are online Help, user manuals, and Web search, and none of those work very well:

• If Help systems still exist for some software, they are typically too mouse-intensive and too fragmented, or they now just launch a Web search (like with Windows Help on your PC);
• user manuals are good for some experienced users, but most people apparently do not ever  use them, and sometimes it’s hard to find the answer to a single question;
• Web search?  Why do we have to use Google to answer questions like “How do I get a photo inserted into my spreadsheet to stay the right size?” and wade thru “John’s 10 Tricks to Using Excel Effectively” and Peter’s “Secrets to Mastering All Spreadsheets”?  Why is quality information on how to use any product a trick or a secret instead of just taking care of your customers?  In any case, using a Web search for getting these answers is like looking for a needle in a haystack or cutting butter with a chainsaw .  Using SetSee on a large, well-written set of FAQ question/answer pairs (say, 100-500 pairs) works beautifully for the user.

A good everyday example of where a FAQ of 200-500 items would be very helpful is for the details and subtleties of the Android UI on smartphones.  As much as such interfaces are relatively easy to learn and use, and power users have learned a lot about them, such users constantly have questions on the details of how parts of the UI behave and on how to alter that behavior—and we are left to using Web search to “try” to find the answers.  It sucks.

Q:

A:

aa-24

“Where did the name ‘SetSee’ come from?”

The name SetSee and the idea for it both came to us at the same time.  Because we have loved Venn diagrams since childhood and seen the world in terms of sets, subsets, and intersections of sets nearly as long, it just made sense: the SetSee idea was a way to “see” inside “sets”.  The alliteration of the “se” letter pair was appealing too.

Q:

A:

aa-25

“Why does your tagline say ‘a new idiom for finding information’?  What is an idiom?”

This tagline is suggesting that it’s time for a new approach to finding text within long pieces of displayed textual material on electronic display screens.  The scroll bar became established more than 30 years ago but is showing its age as we encounter more and longer “pieces” of information in our daily lives.  Web pages needing to display long content adopted UX guidelines 15-20 years ago that break a long piece of text into multiple pages, with NEXT PAGE buttons and such, and in more recent years the practice of infinite scrolling is being adopted more and more; but neither solve the fundamental problem of scroll bars and find commands simply being inadequate tools.  

Doesn’t the scroll bar just reproduce the physical activity of moving your finger down a page and turning pages to get through long text?  Shouldn’t we be using the power of a computer to help us in a  more fundamental way?  And Boolean operators are so powerful at finding just the information we need within a set that we think that it’s time that AND, OR, and NOT are taken advantage of for the smaller “sets” of text that appear in the long content we see these days on our monitors and not just used on the billions of web pages or millions of database records that Boolean operators have long been used for.  Just as scrolling and find commands are the long-established common ways that we all use for dealing with long text—idioms of user interface techniques—SetSee filtering can be a new and better idiom that supplements them and provides more power for those users who need it.

Q:

A:

aa-26

“Was SetSee influenced by Unix?”

Yes.  When we first worked with Unix in graduate school we were delighted at the power of the simple tools at the core of its design, connected by pipes, and in various software roles over the years were big users of ksh functions that used several egrep commands in a pipeline to combine several Boolean operations into a simple & quick way to filter out just the lines we wanted to see from various large system administration  files that we had to work with daily: nifty little tools to help us save time.  We also used the comm command (which does Boolean operations to compare 2 files), though that was not as useful.  So yes, we’re standing on the shoulders of those who came before…  

Q:

A:

aa-27

“Why a flower for the SetSee logo?”

Alas, the logo is not a flower, although we understand why people see it that way (and we do like flowers).  We asked a few graphic designers to come up with something that conveyed intersecting sets in a subtle and colorful way; this one was the best of them.  It is a little hard to see the 6 overlapping circles, but they are there; using a light gray color (instead of white) to shade the intersecting parts might have helped.  To us, it is a subtle and pretty Venn diagram of 6 perfectly overlapping sets.

Q:

A:

aa-28

“I'm confused by your use of both setsee.com and setsee.us.  Why do this?”

This is just a side effect of some changes in our hosting company that had to be suspended before fully finished.  Both sites are used for SetSee and eventually, only a single domain will be used.  Just ignore this for now.

Q:

A:

aa-29

“Does SetSee have any features other than the basic filtering capability?”

Yes, one very useful feature—we use it in our own two FAQ documents—is called URL-encoded initial search.  With this feature, you can do a search on a page, shrinking it down to just the information you want, and then generate a URL that contains arguments; this URL can then be placed as the target of a link in an email or document, and when that link is clicked on by some other user, the same page that you created the link for is opened and SetSee is automatically invoked with the search terms that you used.  This requires that either the document opened by your recipient is embedded with the Publisher Edition or that your recipient has the Personal Edition installed.  For example, this link will open this current FAQ again, but with just 2 items showing after the filtering.

Q:

A:

aa-30

“I never use an OR in a web search.  Why should I care about it when using SetSee?”

The larger the size of the set you are searching, the less useful the OR operator is, since with just a few words AND’d together, you still get a lot of results (e.g., in a Web search, with typically thousands if not millions of results).  And usually, if you’re actually doing web searching on 2 different topics, you are more likely to do 2 separate searches than to use an OR in a single web search.  

But for smaller sets, you often want to identify just a couple of “subsets” of your items, like items associated with certain colors or countries.  This is often provided in the search mechanism built into shopping sites, where you can select what are essentially “OR” operands using a pane on the left side, like for shirt sizes, colors, fabrics, etc.  This eBay search with 300+ results could have been refined with eBay’s filters in the left pane, but it can also be post-filtered with SetSee, like this (this link requires you to have the Personal Edition browser extension installed) to show just the 10 or so shirts of just 2 possible colors, using the SetSee search string orange,blue.  Because of this characteristic property of some searches on smaller sets, the OR operator is quite useful—SetSee is meant for use on smaller sets.  For other examples, see this demo of a search on US patent classes or this search to compare the population of 5 specific countries (this latter link requires you to have the Personal Edition browser extension installed).

Q:

A:

aa-31

How can SetSee be used with Web pages that already use infinite scrolling or a button to bring forth another part of the whole list of things the page offers but broken up into separate pages?

For pages that use infinite scrolling, what you need to do is use the infinite scrolling to ensure that all of the items the page can  bring up are already brought up before you use SetSee. For example, this NY Times page of recent columns by Paul Krugman opens with just about 20 articles (and so the SetSee browser extension would issue an error message, since 25 is the default minimum item count).  But if you press the PageDown key repeatedly, about 15-20 times, or pull the scroll bar down until the pages stops adding new content, you will end up with a few hundred articles and SetSee will work well on the page.

Q:

A:

aa-32

I’ve used some of your demo pages to see how it works and find it frustrating that I can’t see all the post-filtering results on a single page—I still have to use the scrollbar to see all the items that SetSee matched!

Yes, this happens.  One thing you can do is reduce the font size for the text in the browser window (Ctrl-MinusSign is the shortcut for this) to fit more text on your screen at a time.  You can also rotate your monitor into portrait mode (vertical).  This is how we have worked for years—portrait mode on a large 27” 4K monitor—because it is more productive for us as information workers who research, write and edit documents a lot.  Here are 2 small images showing the different appearances of the same filtering result

(the text is not readable in these images, but the comparison view gives you an idea of the difference between using SetSee on a notebook and on a 27” portrait monitor):