Getting Started

The simplest way to use Myallo is:

Start Myallo and let it open an empty, untitled interest profile.
Choose the "Fast Lookup..." command in the Agent menu.
In the Fast Lookup box that appears, enter a search term.

Myallo will call upon the search sites, and display the first results that the search sites return. This is quick and easy, but it is the basically the same as using a search engine in your Internet browser. Since the interest profile is empty, Myallo can't evaluate the results to predict your interest.

A better use of Myallo would be to first open an interest profile before choosing the Fast Lookup command. You can create your own profile from scratch, or use a pre-made or saved profile.

Creating an Interest Profile from scratch is discussed in a subsequent section.

Myallo comes with a pre-made profile called the "General Profile" which you can easily personalize to indicate your interest in a wide variety of topics. This is the best way to get started. Open the General Profile, move some of the sliders to indicate your interests, then use the Fast Lookup command. Myallo will search as before, but now it can rank the results according to the interests you indicated.

By default, Myallo searches the Internet. If you have Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or above, you can set Myallo to search your own computer's files instead of, or in addition to, the Internet. To do this, select the Preferences... command, select the Search Sites tab, then turn on the checkbox for "Spotlight" which will use the system's Spotlight feature to quickly search the text content of your computer's files.

If you use a profile, be sure to save it, and keep using and adjusting it in subsequent sessions. This will cause Myallo to learn and improve its future result rankings.

Using the General Profile

The General Profile is a pre-made profile containing a large number of topics. All you have to do is specify your level of interest in some or all of the topics by setting the sliders, and you have a pretty good profile for overall Internet searches.

The General Profile is a document named "General.profile" found inside the "General Profile" folder that is part of the Myallo distribution.

The General profile document is a template, or "Stationary Pad". This means that when you double-click the General.profile icon to open it, the computer will automatically make a copy of the document and open the copy. This insures that the original General.profile always remains intact. It is the copy that you should save and maintain as your own profile.

The topics in the General Profile are drawn from the topics at the top of the Dewey Decimal library book classification hierarchy. They cover a broad range of areas that might be of interest to anyone.

The items in the profile have been organized into the same hierarchy that the Dewey Decimal System uses.

When you open the profile, you will see interests for the ten top-level topics.

The basic steps to using the General Profile are:

Double-click the General.profile icon in the Finder. The computer will automatically create and open a copy of the profile.
Set interest level sliders on as many of the topics as you can, or at least that relate to whatever you will be searching for. Click the disclosure triangles in the far left column to view or hide sub-topics. Leave the slider at the center if you are don't care about a topic. Move the slider to the right of center to attract Myallo to articles on a topic. Move the slider to the left of center to repel Myallo away from from articles on a topic.
Save the profile at this point. This saved profile is the one you should use and keep adjusting from now on. Save it wherever you like, with any name you like
Select the Myallo "Fast Lookup..." command and enter a search term.
Myallo's agent looks for Web pages matching the search term, it will weed out the results by evaluating them in light of the profile, and places the results into the profile.
Review the results. To open a result in your Internet browser, select it and press the Return key. Or, you can peek at the pages by opening the "Content" drawer and clicking on a result item.
Adjust the sliders on the result items, if necessary, to reflect your actual interest in each result. This is what causes Myallo to learn.
Save the now "smarter" profile for future use.

If you keep using, refining, and saving the same profile, and continue setting interest levels on as many topics as possible, future searches should get better and better. It's fine to delete old results if you like, but you should leave the original interests that were in the profile.

The "Re-open Last Profile" setting in the Preferences (set by default) is very handy. If set, whenever you launch Myallo, it will re-open the saved profile so it will be ready for use. Set a few more interest levels if you like, and do Fast Lookups.

If the General Profile is a bit too general for your taste, you can add your own more specific sub-topics to the profile, using the techniques described in the next section.

There is another way to specify what Myallo should search for, other than through Fast Lookup. You do this by turning on some of the checkboxes in the interest items, and using "Start Agent" instead of "Fast Lookup". This is explained in subsequent sections.

Creating an Interest Profile

When Myallo starts, it displays a new window that holds an empty Interest Profile.

Note: If it doesn't, the Preferences may be set not to do this. You can choose "New" in the File menu to create a new, untitled profile.

To add an Interest to the Profile, select the "New Interest" command from the Profile menu. The Interest appears in the profile, named "New Interest":

We can set the name of the interest to a topic we are interested in, such as "gardening". Use a word or short phrase that might appear exactly in articles you may be interested in. To set a name, click on the interest's name so it is highlighted, then type the new name:

That is all that is necessary to make a profile that finds articles about Gardening! You could start the Agent now and it would find some items. To do that, you would select the "Start Agent" command in the Agent menu.

With only one interest in the profile, the best Myallo can do is find articles with the word "gardening" in it. The more times an article mentions the word "Gardening", the higher the interest it will be assigned. This is handy, but not enough for the best accuracy or to allow learning.

We can get more specific about our gardening interest by adding some more Interests to the profile. Perhaps we are more interested in flower gardening than vegetable gardening. If we tell that to the Agent, it will know which gardening articles it should seek or avoid.

Select "New Interest" from the Profile menu again, and name the new interest "flower". Then drag the flower interest to the right so it becomes indented. To do that, press on the Interest's icon and drag it to the right. A horizontal line indicates the new location of the Interest. Indent both Interests so they look like the illustration below. This makes the flower Interest a "sub-interest" of our more general gardening Interest:

The outline format makes our Interests more organized, and it will help the Agent learn more quickly. It indicates that our interest in flowers are related to our interest in the more general subject of gardening.

Add a third Interest, name it "vegetable", and drag it so it is under "flower".

Now, Myallo can do a better search. Articles that are about flower gardening or vegetable gardening will have a higher predicted interest level than articles that only mention gardening, flower or vegetable alone.

Suppose we are more interested in gardening flowers than vegetables. We can tell Myallo this fact by increasing the level of interest in flowers. Move the Interest Level slider part way over to the right to indicate a higher level of interest in flowers.

Since we said that flower is a sub-interest of gardening, out heightened interest in flowers must mean we are slightly more interested in the general category of gardening. The interest level in gardening automatically adjusts itself slightly to reflect this.

Then, we might drag the slider for "vegetables" toward the left, to indicate a negative interest in vegetable gardening.

Now, the Agent will give greater weight to articles that mention flower gardening. Articles about gardening flowers will have much more priority than articles over gardening vegetables.

If we wanted, we could add more levels of interest. For example we add some Interests indented under "flower" named "rose", "daisy", "tulip" and so forth. Then, you could set the Interest Level sliders to indicate your interests in each kind of flower.

You can add any number of related or unrelated interests to the profile. For example, you might add a new interest called "computer". Under it, you might place "macintosh" with a high level of interest, and "windows" with a low level. With that profile, the Agent might, for example, assign the highest interest to articles about using a Macintosh computer to help with flower gardening. The more interests you add, and the more varied the interests, the more interesting items Myallo might find, and the better it may learn. It does take longer to perform a search on large profile, however.

Our selection of interest names is significant. Upper and lower case don't matter because searches are case-insignificant, but the fact we named an interest "vegetable" instead of "vegetables" does. The Agent only considers an interest to be related to an article it is evaluating if the exact name of the interest appears somewhere in the article. If we named the interest "vegetables" then the plural form of the word must appear in the article, but naming it "vegetable" will cause the Agent to match on "vegetable" or "vegetables" or any text which has "vegetable" in it. There is a way to set an advanced search string for an interest, to do much more powerful kinds of searches, explained elsewhere.

You can name an Interest with a phrase, such as "flower gardening" but that exact phrase will actually have to appear in the article somewhere. Making separate Interests of "flower" and "garden" gives us more accurate matches, and allows us to specify different levels of interest in each thing.

Starting Myallo's Agent

Once an Interest Profile is set up, you can start the Myallo Agent, and the it will immediately begin searching the Internet for interesting articles about gardening.

To start the search, select "Start Agent" from the Agent menu.

Using the "Start Agent" command will cause Myallo to search for Web pages that match the topic names of interests in the profile that have their checkbox set. This is different from the "Fast Lookup" command, where you type in a single string to search for. In "Fast Lookup", the checkboxes on the interests are ignored and only the string you enter is used, but with "Start Agent", all the topics that are marked are searched for.

By default, when the "Start Agent" command is given, the status drawer will open:

As the Agent works, you can follow its progress in the status drawer. If the status drawer isn't open, the "Show Status" command in the Agent menu will open it. The Agent begins at a starting point, typically an Internet search engine, and asks for items on the Internet which mention "gardening". Some of the places returned by the engine are selected as candidates for evaluation.

The Agent goes to the Internet page for each candidate and reads the article there, looking through all of its text (including HTML formatting commands, meta tags, and so on) to evaluate it. It checks the text to see if any of your interest topics are mentioned. It predicts your interest level based on which of your interests match, the relationships between your interests, the level you've specified for those Interests, and some of the detail settings.

When the agent finds an article it feels is sufficiently interesting, it places a new item in your profile which includes the name and location (URL) of the article. Soon, the profile will contain a number of result items. Eventually, the status window will indicate the Agent has finished by saying the status is "Stopped". You can set a preference to play a sound when the agent finishes.

Viewing the Results

Myallo may evaluate a large number of pages, but it only selects the most relevent ones for results. A preference lets you specify how many results it should show. Myallo places the results of its search back into the interest profile, under a new topic that shows the time and date of the session, as illustrated below. A stand-in, or alias, to some of the result items will also appear under some of your original interests. Alias names are shown with a special alias icon.

Because the contents of the Internet are ever changing, your results will vary from those pictured here. These are typical results from the gardening example. Here, we've expanded the display by clicking on the black disclosure triangles in the left margin so we can see all the things placed in the profile:

The results the Agent found are in the ten new Interests which appear under the first heading. Aliases to some of these results have also been added by the Agent. All aliases have the alias icon, a light bulb with an arrow. The original three Interests are still there (the ones with check marks) the Agent added the other interests during its search - One result heading, ten result Interests, and the Aliases to the result Interests.

Each of the items in the results represent a Web page. The name of the interest is derived from the page's title or file name, and the "Location" column shows the URL, or Internet Address, of the Web page holding the article. You can select a result interest and choose "Open Interest" from the Interest menu to cause your Internet browser application to open and show the page.

The Alias Interests that the agent added link the results to the interests in your profile that participated in their evaluation.

An alias is linked to its original Interest. Changing the settings of any Interest or Alias, will simultaneously change the original Interest and all its aliases. If you delete an Interest, all Aliases to it are also deleted. Deleting an Alias, however, only deletes that alias and no others.

To view one of the result articles, you can also double click on the interest, in the "Opened" column. Myallo will launch your Internet browser and display the article. You can also use the "Open Interest" command as described above, or glimpse the page in the Content drawer.

Giving Myallo Your Feedback

If you tell Myallo how well it did in evaluating articles, it will adjust the Interest Profile to reflect your interests more accurately. Then, the Agent may do a better job when the profile is used in the future.

Suppose we think the first article listed in the results was not as interesting as the agent said it would be. We can tell Myallo this by moving the slider a bit toward the left.

Moving the Interest Level slider does more than just change the level of that one Interest. It also propagates the change back to all the interests it is linked to, directly, indirectly, or through aliases. This is the mechanism for learning.

When you adjust an Interest level, the items affected include:

Any alias to the interest you adjusted get set to the same level. If the thing you adjusted is an alias, then the original to which it points, and all aliases to it, get set to the new level. In other words, an interest and all its aliases always maintain the same level.
The parent of the interest you adjusted (and any Aliases) get adjusted by a smaller amount. In our example, "gardening" is the parent of "flower" and "vegetable" so if you adjust "flower", "gardening" is also adjusted by a smaller amount.
The children of the Interest you adjusted (and any Aliases) get adjusted by a smaller amount. In our example, "flower" and "vegetable" are children of "gardening" so if you adjust "gardening" both "flower" and "vegetable" will be adjusted by a smaller amount.
For each of these aliases, parent, and children, their aliases, parents, and children are also adjusted, but by an even smaller amount. This process continues recursively until the adjustments are too small to make a significant difference. Myallo has a mechanism that makes sure that infinite loops and "ringing" don't cause endless adjustments.

The amount that an Interest is adjusted depends on many factors, including the levels in the related Interests, the number of children, the presence of a parent, the arrangement of the outline, and the detail settings.

In an Interest Profile that covers a wide range of interests, your feedback, can cause a large number of small adjustments throughout the profile. This propagation to related Interests are what can cause the Agent to learn and improve its future performance.