This set of options specify whether SSSpider should reach the Web through a proxy server on your local area network. A proxy server acts as a security barrier between your network and the Internet thus protecting confidential information kept within your local area network from being accessed by other people on the Internet. You may instruct SSSpider to use a particular Proxy Server by specifying its address (URL) and port or not to use any. By default, SSSpider uses settings specified in the MS Internet Explorer "Internet Options" dialog.

The majority of authentication schemes (such as, Integrated Windows Authentication supported by Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server, ISA) use your Windows account and password, and do not require any additional information to be entered for the "User" and the "Password" fields. Fill in these fields only if you get the message "The proxy server authentication failed" on the SSSpider Execution screen. The required user name and password are to be typically given to you by your System Administrator or Internet Provider. To prevent unauthorized access to your user name and password, both options will be kept by SSSpider in encrypted form. In addition, the actual value of the password is not displayed: shown is the star "*" sign in place of any character you type in for the password field.

This option instructs SSSpider how long it should wait (in minutes) to receive a reply from a search engine. The default value set for this option is 8 minutes; if some search engine does not respond within this period, SSSpider stops inquiring this particular engine and proceeds with another one.
See also: How SSSpider works

This value instructs SSSpider how long it should wait (in minutes) to receive a Web document to be investigated before SSSpider can proceed with its search. Typically, Web servers respond quickly and as such, by default, SSSpider is given up to 10 minutes for transferring one document.
See also: How SSSpider works

Specifies how many Internet locations you would like SSSpider to visit simultaneously. The application can connect to up to 20 Internet hosts at a time which considerably accelerates the SSSpider performance.

If this box is checked, SSSpider keeps contents of the most recently visited pages in the "Temporary Internet Files" folder. Though some additional disk space for storing temporary Internet files is required, this may speed up SSSpider searches as the application does not have to download the same page twice. Besides, if your default browser is MS Internet Explorer, storing visited pages speeds up their loading into the browser and also makes them available offline. If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer as your default browser, the disk space to use is controllable via its Internet Options dialog. Otherwise, it's set to approximately 2% of the total disk space.

SSSpider provides you with the ability to update settings of existing Search Engines, and also to add new ones to the product Search Engine Registry by downloading appropriate files from the Kryloff Web site, and merging their contents with those of your local copy of SSSpider. Kryloff Technologies is checking all engines SSSpider is shipped with, on the regular basis, placing corresponding files on its Web site thus allowing your copy of SSSpider to download these files during the updating procedure and to keep your engines in the up-to-date status.

Note, that the product does not automatically introduce any changes into your Search Engine Registry due to the following reasons:

Specifies the total number of documents SSSpider should receive and investigate while processing queries. Set this field to zero or just clear it if you want SSSpider to investigate as many Web documents as it can within a given time period.
See also: Timeout for processing queries.

This field allows you to control how long (in minutes) you would like SSSpider to spend processing a particular query. Enter zero in this field (or, just empty) if you do not wish to set up any time limit. In this case SSSpider will keep on working until it either downloads the required number of documents or you press the Report now button on the query execution screen.
See also: Locations to visit.

Fill in this field with the number of quotations to be extracted from the documents SSSpider has retrieved. The quotations included in a report are based on the SSSpider ability to match information contained in the documents it scans, to the search phrase you enter. The value of this field should be between 20 and 1,000.
See also: How SSSpider works.

The Min. Relevancy field (Minimum percentage of relevancy) is only relevant to those queries for which you are going to obtain a comprehensive report. SSSpider generates reports with the most relevant quotes/extracts from the documents accessed during the search. Each quotation is ranked for relevancy with some value in the 0%-100% range. This option instructs SSSpider to skip those quotations which do not exceed the value you specify in this field. The higher the value, the fewer quotes. As a general rule, 20%-50% is a good value to place here.
See also: How SSSpider works, step 3.

If checked, this option instructs SSSpider to process only documents that have been created or modified on or after the date you specify.

Note: Some Web servers do not report the date a particular document or Web page has been last modified or created. If these documents are still relevant to the subject of your queries, SSSpider does include corresponding quotations in its reports.

Enter domains suffixes to narrow your searches to the specified domains only. For example, to make SSSpider process pages which URL's end up with either ".net" or ".com", enter each of them clicking the Add Suffix button.

If you have not specified any domain suffixes (which is the default option), SSSpider downloads and investigates all documents. If the list of suffixes is not empty, then before downloading each document SSSpider checks if its Internet address (URL) is within the list of domain suffixes you have specified. If it is, SSSpider downloads, investigates, and if the document contains relevant information, includes corresponding quotation(s) into the final report.

Note: Some search engines hide true location of pages in their reports (i.e., provide links to some intermediate Web servers, which redirect your browser to the original document location only in one or several steps). Despite a high enough level of the SSSpider intelligence, this may still cause the product to skip pages it should have processed. It is recommended that you check if SSSpider does correctly resolve these links by issuing a couple of test queries: one with and one more without domain suffixes, and only after it start using SSSpider with a non-empty (default) set of domain suffixes on the regular basis. As one more recommendation, include in your list domain suffix(es) of the engines you use.

SSSpider supports searches in a large number of languages (see SSSuite Multi-Language Support for details). If you need to find information in a language other than English, select the language of your choice. After this, SSSpider will start executing all new queries in your language by default.

The SSSpider smart language detecting algorithms perform automatic conversion of documents being processed, into the selected coding table. It is especially required for those languages, which allow data representation under several coding tables, such as Japanese or Russian. For example, by selecting Japanese SHIFT JIS for a query language, you are instructing SSSpider to convert all incoming documents into SHIFT JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) encoding table; this conversion is performed even for those Web sites, which publish their pages in Japanese EUC, Japanese New-JIS, Japanese Old-JIS and Japanese NEC-JIS encoding. So, for these languages you should select the coding table in which you enter queries; than the required conversion is automatically done by SSSpider.

With the SSSpider smart text search engine you have the possibility to investigate each Web page provided by engines from the Search Set you've selected. As a result, you will be given a comprehensive report, which contains the most relevant excerpts from different Web pages selected by the SSSpider engine.

If you are low on time and do not want to wait until SSSpider finishes the detailed investigation, you may instruct SSSpider to generate a quick report, which will contain just short descriptions or summaries of each Web page that can possibly answer your query. Quick reports are built based on the information which SSSpider obtains from search engines and therefore, they do not contain quotations from the source documents.

1. The "Subject search" method is capable of selecting paragraphs, in which your search phrase might be altered, modified, or even misspelled. This method is especially useful when searching for information you are just getting familiar with. This method accepts natural queries (entering something like "how can I rent a car in Italy" is OK), so it is the most powerful and the convenient one.
   Despite this fact, in a number of cases selecting one of the following Literal Search methods SSSpider also provides you with, may be more preferable. For example, when you are looking for occurrences of a particular person's name, geographical location, or/and number or numbers.
   
   
2. The literal search method "All words in same order ignore case" selects documents containing all of the words in your phrase following each other and separated by one or several spaces or/and line breaks. For example, "Kryloff Technologies" is matched to:
   a) "  Kryloff        Technologies  ",
   b) "KRYLOFF (end of line)
      TECHNOLOGIES", etc., but
   c) not to "Kryloff Technology".
   To match the words "Technology" and "Technologies", use the Subject Search method described above.
3. The literal search method "Entire pattern ignore case" selects documents containing your search phrase as you type it in (including leading and trailing spaces, special characters, etc.). For example, "Kryloff Technologies" gets matched to just "Kryloff Technologies", "KRYLOFF technologies", but not to "KRYLOFF   (two or more spaces or line breaks)   Technologies".
4. The literal search method "All words from the phrase ignore case" allows finding documents that contain just all words in your Search Phrase. You may enter only some part of the words. As an example, the search phrase "Kryl Tech" will be matched to "Kryloff Technologies"; also selected will be any other documents containing, for example, the words "Kryloff" and "Technical", "Kryloff" and "Technology", (anywhere in the text or document title), etc.
5. The literal search method "At least one word ignore case" selects documents containing at least one (any) word you have entered into your search phrase. For example, issuing the query "Kryl Tech" will cause SSSpider to select documents which contain either "Kryloff" or "Technologies", or both as well as "Technology", "Technical", etc.
   
   All methods described above (including the "Subject Search" one) are case insensitive: the patterns "Kryloff", "KRYLOFF" and "kryloff" are considered to be the same. The following four methods make distinction between uppercase and lowercase characters when searching for occurrences of your search terms; the rest of functionality of these methods has been just described above in this section:
   
   
6. The literal search method "All words in the same order match case" makes distinction between capital (uppercase) and small (lowercase) characters. See also: "All words in same order ignore case".
7. The literal search method "Entire pattern match case" selects documents which contain your phrase bodily (as you type it in) without any changes. See also, "Entire pattern ignore case" described above.
8. The literal search method "All words from the phrase match case" is identical to the method "All words from the phrase ignore case" described above except for the fact that it makes distinction between capital and small characters.
9. The literal search method "At least one word match case" is also similar to "At least one word ignore case", but it treats capital and small letters as absolutely different ones and does not match them to each other (even if they represent the same sound in the language of your choice).

SSSpider can include the list of sites which have been visited and investigated during the search, in the bottom of its reports.

This value tells SSSpider how many characters (approximately) are to be extracted from downloaded documents and placed into the final reports. A value of 500-1,500 characters is a reasonable one as it allows you to read the most relevant paragraphs extracted from different Web pages by looking directly through the report. That way you can quickly determine whether a document contains information that is relevant to your search.

If the box "Allow multiple quotations from the same document" is checked, SSSpider may include in its report more than one quotation from the same document. This may happen for big documents, which obviously, may contain information that is relevant to the subject of your query, in many paragraphs. Apart from fully enabling or disabling the appearance of several quotations from the same document, you may control the way how SSSpider extract quotations. Specify the number of characters SSSpider should skip when it places a quotation into the report before it can resume quoting the same document, again. If the option "Skip Between Quotations" is not specified, (or, is set to zero) SSSpider includes as many relevant quotes as it finds.

Specifies the target window to load the link into. By default, SSSpider builds its reports so, that the browser creates a new window to load each link. By checking this box you may specify that the links are be loaded directly into SSSpider report window; in this case you can use the browser's Back button to see the report window, again.

When you are deleting a query and this box is checked, SSSpider erases not only the query but the corresponding report as well.

SSSpider can load reports into either an external (default) browser or a built-in one. When you check the box "Use internal browser", SSSpider will automatically start displaying corresponding reports when you select queries in the Query Folder. This option also affects the way SSSpider displays reports when you double-click a completed query using the left mouse button: if the box is checked, corresponding reports are loaded into the internal browser window.

SSSpider automatically loads reports into a browser if you check the option Show at once.

SSSpider can play a media sound (e.g. a .wav file) if you enter the sound file name into the corresponding field. The button next to the field "Play Sound" allows you to review the sound file you have selected.

Click an item to toggle its check mark. If the box is checked, SSSpider will be asking you to confirm the corresponding action. If the box is cleared, SSSpider will be proceeding without prompting (presuming that you always answer with "Yes").

Another way to suppress a confirmation prompt is to check the box "Do not ask about it in the future" when the prompt appears on screen. The same way you may prevent SSSpider from displaying warning messages and some hints: switching off hints is not recommended, though. Some hints or prompting for confirmation boxes do not have the check box "Do not ask about it in the future": this has been done on purpose to protect critical actions such as deleting the entire contents of query folders, etc.

SSSpider provides you with the possibility to change icons using which the product should display postponed, completed, and running queries. Small icons will be displayed when you click the Query Folder pane using the right mouse button, after which select either "Small icons", "List" or, "Table". Subsequently, large icons will be displayed when you select the "Large icons" menu item in the query folder pop-up menu. The way SSSpider displays queries, does not affect the rest of the product functionality and has been implemented for your convenience only.

To let you refresh your memory and to watch how to perform basic actions in SSSpider (such as, how to run new queries, etc.), prepared was a set of demonstrations the product may display when you run it. The check box "Show demonstration window at start-up" toggles this functionality.

Note, that even if you put a check mark in the corresponding box, the demonstration window will not be shown if you have already performed each of the actions being demonstrated, at least once. In this case, you should click the button "Show demonstrations right now".

The "Show balloon help messages" check box enables or disables the appearance of small pop-up (normally) yellow windows with some hints on them when you position the mouse pointer over a particular element of SSSpider dialogs and screen forms. Regardless of the value of this check box, the product always shows short hint messages at the bottom of its main window.

If you wish, you may change colors of four major panes the SSSpider main window consists of. Select a pane, press the Change button, then choose a desired color and finally, click "OK". To restore the original color palette of the product, simply click the Restore button. This option does not affect the rest of the product functionality and has been implemented for your convenience only.

This option takes effect when you click OK in the SSSpider Options dialog. When checked, it instructs SSSpider to replace all search settings in existing postponed queries (those which have not been executed yet) in the currently open folder with those you have specified in the SSSpider Options dialog. If this option is not checked, SSSpider does not perform any replacements. In this case the changes you have made, will start affecting newly created queries only.