Seeks is a free and open source venture accredited by the Affero General Public License 3, which allows users to share their queries to search engines and thus provide an alternative to the existing market leading search portals. Seeks works by grouping users with similar queries so they can share the results as well as their experience upon them. Among benefits, its creators mention the possibility of social web search, building communities based on interests and even dating.

The main features of Seeks include website ranking and ratings, open chat and comments on websites and a direct publishing system which allows to get rid of crawlers, enabling true real-time web search. It can currently be used as a public search engine, web proxy, or web application.

Why should you use it?

Because it allows full privacy and user control over the searches. Also, an innovation award won by the Seeks team in September 2011 at the open world forum is a good enough reason to give it a try.