UPDATE/ATTENTION: As of March 21st, 2013 XPASE has stopped accepting new entries into the system via the means described below on this page that have previously been used. If you wish to have your website added from this point onward please visit us over on LEPZARD.COM and let us know. XPASE began with members of Lepzard running the project and at this point we're thinking about migrating the relevant parts of XPASE over to Lepzard itself for continuation. The current system has just become a magnet for junk though and freezing the automated link capturing is essentially the simplest way of clearing the index and keeping the results useful for our purposes. Thank you.


     XPASE is an acronym for e(X)perimental (P)assive (A)ggressive (S)earch (E)ngine. XPASE was started in 2008 with intentions of being used as a non-commercial personal bookmarking tool for a small group of friends, and for the thrill of experimenting with website ranking algorithms used in tandem with a non-traditional passive spidering system. At present it remains much like it began, with its few repeat power users directly bookmarking sites, a small trickle of webmasters adding sites via the method described later in this text, and because XPASE primarily follows the hobbies and interests of a select few, the majority of entries in it remain highly clustered into a few basic categories.

     Unlike most search engines that follow the analogy of a spider crawling a world wide web of information, XPASE can instead be thought of as the spider that sits in the center of the web, waiting for flies to get stuck in its trap. Those flies consist of you, other humans, and any misc bots that roam the web. Once caught, you're available to XPASE. If you'd like your site to be available to XPASE, merely create a link from your home page or other static page to www.xpase.net, click through it, and your site will become noticed by XPASE automatically. The first time you do this, you may, or may not, see an XPASE Query pop up requesting voluntary information about your site to help it understand where it should be placed within the search results. Don't panic if you either don't see this, or can't answer something on it for any reason. XPASE will fill in the blanks or seek input elsewhere in its own way (user input/lucky guesses). Likewise, you may from time to time see XPASE request information directly in the query results and categories which anyone may respond to, not just a webmaster, at which point you're welcome to volunteer anything you wish to in order to answer its questions.

     XPASE's own passive spidering strategy, user bookmarking, and user queries allow the XPASE "AI" (overblown chaotic algorithm) to gather data to perform the majority of internal tasks to form results for XPASE users. This method was created specifically to let XPASE have the final say about whatever it returns. No single external or internal user/element simply gets to be the deciding vote on how results are formed. This amuses certain parties to no end, and that's all you need to know other than that it is hoped the results for whatever you're searching for will be relevant. Please also note that "no matter what hat you may wear" when visiting XPASE, that the term "passive aggressive" highly relates to how XPASE handles its data, traffic and potential abusers of such, and you're much better off not trying to find reason in what it does.

     It should be noted that XPASE has had a few years to mature and has evolved in various ways. It became clear over a certain time period that some sub pages were becoming a resource for additional people. As a result there has been a constant effort to keep the data up to date, manual bookmarking for certain resources has never ceased thanks to obsessive surfing on the part of a few folks, and the site has been streamlined repeatedly to keep things simple and easy to use.

     XPASE's current privacy policy is that if you're here, any and all information gained by your actions on XPASE and incoming data it is able to detect are used exlusively for the purpose of further developing the software and training the module which primarily controls the query results and their relevance at XPASE's core. Information automatically gathered and stored by XPASE is not the sort of information that can be used to specifically identify you (as a definitive individual) on return visits. Information requested by XPASE Queries to human visitors that may optionally be responded to is voluntary and may be retained indefinately for a variety of purposes. One such purpose is to fill in voids of information about URLs and it should never be trusted as anything more than fictional data, as is the case with any web based project where the general populace has been able to offer input.

Webmasters please note:

• Be aware that when you decide to add yourself to XPASE by creating a link on your site to the XPASE domain, you may do so from any page of your site. If the page is static in nature it will likely be recieved by XPASE without a hitch and the resulting entry in XPASE will link directly to whatever page that may be. If the page you're adding is dynamic/uses variables in the URL, then XPASE will try resolve to the primary domain name instead. I.e. www.example.com?var1=dogs will turn into www.example.com as far as XPASE is concerned, but www.example.com/dogs.html would be fine and will create an entry in XPASE to that page directly. There are some additional notes about this further down the page.
  
  
• You may even use the NOFOLLOW command in your link, and can remove the link from your site when done. Of course, if you want more people to find you on XPASE then you might consider leaving your link up, to encourage use, but that's your call as a webmaster. We'd like the traffic to really test XPASE out of course, but please don't feel obligated.
  
  
• It came to our attention a while back that a few webmasters were wanting to treat XPASE a bit like they treat some of their other favorite web sites. This has taken the form of people hunting for XPASE buttons to setup on their sites, offering opinions on results, creating direct links to the category pages, and in one case someone realized they could treat XPASE a bit like one of those dime a dozen top site type places that have been springing up all over the web. This is all inevitable, but again we encourage you not too waste much time and energy on these sort of things.
  
  To explain the noted bits above in brief:
  
  
  1. If you want a button to XPASE, a couple of options have been made available at the bottom of this page.
  2. You can actually create inbound links to the homepage (www.xpase.net) OR to one of the more elaborate URLs of the established category pages. Either way works. The difference is that connecting to one of the category pages ends up with an instant display of the category in question, whereas connections to the home page result in XPASE attempting to show visitors some sites which it thinks are related to your own. Nifty, ey? Be aware that on the first visit from a newly included site XPASE will probably spew generic suggestions at you.
  3. If you want to offer opinions on the results of queries we'd be curious to hear what you have to say, but really are only interested in cases where queries return irrelevant results. The whole point of no one being able to have total control of what pops up was to prevent our social group from getting jaded or wasting far too much time on such trivial things as favoritism.
  4. Traffic is noted and does play into building results. XPASE takes a few cues from that activity and because of the "passive aggressive" nature of XPASE, those cues might not perform quite like you would expect from a search engine.
  
  
• *Some web sites have been placed into XPASE manually by a few people close to the XPASE project. Those sites are generally sites those of us nerdy enough to build a feature like this actually tend to visit, and if you've seen traffic come to you from XPASE, that's probably because you have a site someone already knows and trusts and enjoyed enough to "bookmark" in this manner. If you are NOT a webmaster of a site you think is highly relevant to one of our main categories, but believe a site you know of should join those ranks, you can now shoot us an email via supportconvertthis(at)xpaseandthis(dot)net. Please put the category for the site as the message title, as that will be used to toss your email off to whomever it is that has an interest in such things. Do be sure to include the actual URL in the message body and maybe a brief description as well.
  
  
• In all reality this site exists out of curiosity and for the benefit of small community of nerds who are most likely the main users at any given time. The special categories you see on the home page reflect our interests. You may contact us over at Lepzard.com should you need any help with XPASE or via the email address given above. Also be aware that XPASE started and will continue primarily as an overly elaborate menu/bookmarking site for OUR social group, and that's the only relevant factor as far as development and moderating goes at this time. You cannot influence the XPASE Project if you're not within said social group, by monetary means or otherwise unless you interact with an automated query, so please don't waste time treating this like most other search engines or expecting something specific from XPASE. Just try and enjoy it if any of the primary categories of interest here overlap your own.

Also worth noting:

• Query syntax should be composed of just words. There are no special boolean commands. There are no quotes or other special advanced commands needed at this time. XPASE saves you the time and effort by trying to organize small groups of words you query with on its own. i.e. A query for space and time could be entered as just space time. This will likely be expanded on in the future.
  
  
• To further explain how XPASE handles dynamic URLs as noted previously on this page, we have to mention the limitations of sorting URLs that are junk vs what are likely relevant. XPASE's code is written to assume that most top level domain names on their own are valid. Just assuming this and rejecting the vast majority of what a lot of people usually call "deep links" would eliminate a lot of potentially interesting web pages which XPASE could be indexing. This makes it worthwhile to try and dig deeper. To compensate, XPASE looks for some cues as to what might be spam, what might be valid, what might be broken, and the oddball exlusion of what might be potentially abusive. If you're still reading this, then you must actually be interested in this sort of thing, so here are a few examples to bore you further.
  
  
  1.    A broken URL might come in the form or something that is dynamic, where the variables in the URL are used as session IDs and the page content won't load properly without someone being logged in. There is no point in creating an XPASE entry for such an address. Instead, resolving such a URL to the primary domain name should at least yield a valid result.
     
     
  2.    An example of a spam URL could be where a spammer creates tons of dynamic pages which will exist for only a short period of time, and have zero relevance to anything this site is about. Resolving to the primary domain again weeds out a lot of potential issues.
     
     
  3.    On a related note, there are ways to render a URL in a dynamic fashion from the server side which make them seem more static than they really are when there are no variables present in the URL. XPASE looks for these and trys to revert them to the domain level instead. XPASE's ability to detect such things is an ongoing work and results will vary.
  
  
• An unexpected result of passive spidering has been a rather large number of incidental inclusions into the the XPASE results of other search engines. In fact, every time some curious person has stumbled across XPASE from any other search portal it has really gone quite far to demonstrate how vast the web is and what sort of variety exists out there. Those of us who've used XPASE so far have enjoyed this growing list of other search engines to try out and suggest if you cannot find something you're after on here or by another common engine, then you might want to try using the items in the "search engines" category. A few may be surprisingly amusing.