Dowser is a research tool for the web. It clusters results from major search engines, associates words that appear in previous searches, and keeps a local cache of all the results you click on in a searchable database. It helps you keep track of what you find on the web.

Future versions will have 'shallow' crawling of websites you click and a peer-to-peer component. Here is a very good discussion about distributed web searching.

-- Enjoy!
    Aristus

Download Dowser for Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac OSX.

See the screenshots

Installing

There are standalone binaries for Mac OSX and Windows. Running from the source files requires Python 2.3 or higher, sqlite 2.6 or higher and pysqlite. Dowser works with any browser. Text-mode browsers like lynx miss out on some of the nifty features.

When you first use Dowser, it will create a directory in your home directory to store the database.

Mac OSX

X version 10.3 and higher already includes Python 2.3+. Download and mount the dmg disk image and drag the Dowser app to your Applications folder.

Windows

The windows binary comes with a slick installer -- run the .exe and make sure to tell it to add a shortcut to the desktop. The W32 version gets the least attention, so help is appreciated.

Running From Source

Make sure you have built and installed Python and sqlite and the pysqlite bridge. (The source zip comes with a precompiled Mac library for sqlite). cd into the main directory and run python startdowser.py.

Building From Source

To build for Mac, you also need the PyObjC framework. To build for Windows, you will need py2exe, which for some reason needed Microsoft Visual C++ version 6.0 to install. Your mileage may vary.

Mac: run macbuild.sh. It will create a build directory and place Dowser.app in there.

Windows: run winbuild.bat It will create a build and dist directory and place the final application in dist. The entire contents of dist is required for distribution.

"What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"
-- Bill Gates, An Open Letter to Hobbyists, 1976