A Brief Introduction to “SetSee”

SetSee is a user interface technique that is an alternative (and supplement) to the scrollbar and the “find” commands used by the software that displays textual content on electronic screens. It improves the user experience and satisfaction of people looking for information within long displays of content.

Besides their frustrations with Web searching itself, people are often dissatisfied with their experience trying to find information when looking for specific text within content already displayed on their computer monitors, whether articles, file listings, FAQs, Wikipedia pages, legal briefs, or research papers.  Inadequate tools largely cause this problem—both the 40-year-old scrollbar (which lets you move around the text within the “window” of your monitor) and the “find” commands (which bounce you around that text while highlighting single instances of some string) are no longer adequate for our needs. There is so much content (& such long content), and PCs are massively more powerful than 4 decades ago… Users need a more powerful tool.

SetSee software improves the experience of finding what you want in the text that is already displayed on your monitor, removing unwanted content by dynamically and temporarily reducing the length of the displayed content so that you can focus on just what you need, even finding multiple words.  This is done in a simple & familiar manner: typing a few words into a pop-up search box, using a simple syntax for doing AND, OR, & NOT searching.  SetSee is simple and nifty—but very useful—like Velcro® or Post-It® notes. The video images below show it working on a few pages [see these & others, only larger].

The first product, an MVP, works in Web browsers; future products could work in various OS applications & utilities, document viewers, and probably PDF readers, on multiple platforms: PCs, Macs, e-book readers, specialty tablets, store kiosks, even televisions.   The initial free MVP has 2 products: the Personal Edition—a browser extension (only Chrome, for now) for individuals—and the Publisher Edition  (sometimes called “embedded” SetSee), a single line of HTML code for website publishers to include in web pages, fetching code from the cloud to enable the SetSee capability for anyone visiting those enabled pages, from any browser.

NOTE: SetSee does not work on all web pages that have repetitive content—and sites like the NY Times with elaborate page layouts are generally not possible to handle—but over time we will improve the algorithm.

Would you like to:  See it in action?  Try it—without installing it?   Read more?   Install it?   We recommend doing items 1-4 in the order listed, but feel free to jump to the 4th item and install the Personal Edition right away.

Problems?  Send an email to  help@setsee.com.         ⌹             Want to read more?