3. System Overview

Points - in Figure 3 show how a typical user will search A$\lambda$goVista. A query is submitted through the A$\lambda$goVista web page, transferred to the A$\lambda$goVista server, and matched against the checklets in the checklet database (the checklet coop). The output from any accepting checklet is transferred back to the client and presented to the user.

 

Figure: Alice, a theoretician, and Bob, a software developer, interact with A$\lambda$goVista. At 1, Bob submits a search query. At 2, the query is mutated into a set of two queries by the transformation database. At 3, the search engine matches these queries against the checklets in the checklet coop. The output of any accepting checklets is returned to Bob at 4. At 5, Alice registers as a potential contributor to A$\lambda$goVista. At 6, she submits an example query of a checklet Add she intends to write and receives a template checklet in return. At 7, she modifies the template, and uploads it to the checklet coop.

  

Figure 4: Exhaustive search algorithm.

Figure 4 shows the basic A$\lambda$goVista search algorithm. The algorithm is very simple: a query is submitted to every checklet in the database, and the response of every accepting checklet is returned. In Section 5 we show that a query may also undergo a set of representation transformations prior to being submitted. These transformations try to compensate for the fact that user queries and checklets may use different data representations for the same problem. In Section 7 we explore more sophisticated algorithms that speed up search times significantly.