XPASE is an acronym for e(X)perimental (P)assive (A)ggressive (S)earch (E)ngine. 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. Said another way, XPASE doesn't go out looking for new web sites to index like most other search engines do. It waits for incoming traffic from a specific site before taking an interest in most cases*. 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, outbound spidering, lucky guesses). Likewise, you may from time to time see XPASE request information right 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.

     Combining XPASE's own passive spidering strategy, queries, and occassional outbound spidering on included sites lets the AI 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 the AI handles its data, traffic and potential abusers of such, and you're much better off not trying to find reason in what it does.

     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 AI 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 vistors may optionally respond 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, provided it is not dynamic/uses variables in the URL. If you try otherwise, the URL will 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. 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 web master. We'd like the traffic to really test XPASE out of course, but please don't feel obligated.
  
  
• It came to our attention recently 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 recently 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 that page, 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.
  
  
• 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 this 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. 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.
  
  
• 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.