Q:  Which browsers does SetSee run in?

A:    The Browser Edition, our consumer product, as of Nov 2023 runs only in Chrome, on any OS that the Chrome browser supports (Windows, MacOS, Linux).   Versions for Firefox, Edge, Safari, and other browsers are planned (additional work is needed to build the browser-specific extensions).

A:    The Publisher Edition (with which a website owner can give the SetSee capability to all users visiting a single page) was designed to work with all major browsers and has been tested in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, and Safari.  So, e.g., all of the demo pages listed in the Demos document can be played with in any browser.

Q:   What is the most recent version of SetSee?  How can I tell if I have it?  0010

A:    The latest version is v1.1.3.0, released in Nov 2023.  The version of SetSee you are using is shown in the bottom left corner of the SetSee panel when it is open (the panel is at the bottom right of the browser window):

Q:  I just installed SetSee and have never clicked on the SetSee icon in the browser’s
toolbar.  But SetSee is popping up a purple notice at the top right of the window saying “SetSee may be able to filter this page.  Want to try?”.   Why do I get this?  Can I make this go away?  

A:  Personal Edition only - There is an option that defaults to yes that tells SetSee to do a preliminary analysis of the page to determine if it might be able to filter a page and to post this unobtrusive & brief message (it only appears for 3 seconds) if it determines it can:

This is to let you know that you may be able to filter the page if you start SetSee.  Note that the message uses the phrase may be able to because the current algorithm sometimes determines that it can filter a page when in fact it cannot, or cannot do it usefully.  These false positive analyses will decrease as we refine the algorithm in the future.

You can turn this option off on the Preferences page, by unchecking the box for it:

Q:   How do I invoke SetSee when I am on a Web page?

A:  Personal Edition only -  There are 3 ways to invoke SetSee:

1. Click on the SetSee icon in the extension panel that appears at the top right of the Chrome window.  
   NOTE: To see this icon, you have to have pinned it there from the Extensions  ►Manage Extensions page available from the 3-dot Chrome menu bar at the top right of the Chrome window:
   
   This youTube video explains how to do this.
   
2. You can use the keyboard shortcut Alt-Ctrl-s to activate it (and deactivate it).  See the Q-A pair in this document with the phrase have any in it to see more.
   
3. You can set an option to auto-invoke SetSee when a new web page loads.  See the Q-A pair in this document with the 3 words tired of clicking.

Q:   I get tired of clicking on the SetSee icon in the browser navigation bar to start SetSee on a page I have just loaded.  Can I do it automatically so that I can browse around the web and see what pages work with it?

A:  Personal Edition only -  Yes you can, and that is a good idea when you are new to SetSee, to just see what it can do on any page you visit.  You can turn this option on in Preferences:

See the Q/A pair below to learn how to change your Preferences.

Q:  How do I change the options that govern how SetSee behaves?

A:   Personal Edition only -  You change the options on the SetSee Options page, which opens when you click on the Preferences link in the panel:

Q:   I’m confused by the metrics shown in the panel when I start SetSee.  It reports “4 regions detected (502 total items)”.  What’s the difference between regions and items?

A:    A region is a part of the page whose internal structure is determined by SetSee analysis to be filterable. There can be multiple regions on a single web page—or none, in which case SetSee cannot work with the page.  Also, there can be text on the page that is not in any identified region and that text is not affected by SetSee filtering.

For example, a bullet list, a table, or a series of paragraphs could all be a region, and different lists could be in different regions.  An item is a single part of the region that could show up after you filter the page (a single item could be the only match in the set).  SetSee determines what constitutes an “item” on a particular page, and how many items there are in each region, and reports the total number, across all the regions, in the above message in the panel.  When you filter such a page, the above message changes to something like “50/502 items matched (10%)”, showing you how many of the items, across all the regions, matched your search terms.

Q:  SetSee is showing me an error that says “No items could be found to filter.”  
     What does this mean?

A:  Personal Edition only -  We assume that you mean that you got the following pop-up in the SetSee panel when you tried to start SetSee on a web page:  

This is not really an “error”—and we will update the message to be more precise in the next release—since not all Web pages have a repetitive structure that SetSee can detect.  A second meaning that will also be made clearer when the message is updated is that there is repetitive content, but the number of instances of that information is less than the current setting (a user preference) for what we call minItems, which defaults to 25.   This option is the minimum number of pieces of repetitive content that SetSee must find to identify a region for filtering; if there are fewer than this item, you will get this message.  In general, users are not helped much by SetSee on pages with 25 or fewer items.

The error message suggests that you should Try adjusting your preferences.  You do this by clicking on the Preferences link in the bottom right of the panel, and this opens a tab on a Chrome internal page where you can reduce the default setting of 25 to a different number.  See the Q-A pair above with the phrase setsee options.

Note, however, that the lower the value that you set this number to, the more issues you may have with how SetSee behaves.  Since SetSee is designed to filter long content, we have to decide on a working definition of long content—and we have decided on 25 items (of repetitive content).  When you set this lower, the current algorithm may identify, as regions, parts of the page that cannot meaningfully be filtered.  So though we let you lower this value, caution is in order.  And if you lower it below 10, you will surely run into problems trying to use SetSee.  And if you lower it to 1, don’t complain—just explain to us what value you think there is in filtering a set that only has 1 item in it!  We picked 25 because we felt that most lists or tables or articles of 25 items can be fairly quickly scanned visually, without SetSee, to find what you want.  Maybe setting it to 20, maybe to 15, occasionally to 10, will be useful.  But typically 25 works well for people.

 Publisher Edition only - Note that this limit is hard-coded in the Publisher Edition and cannot be changed.  Thus, the Publisher Edition will not work on pages where SetSee cannot identify 25 or more items in a region, and no error message is issued (this is because we presume that the website owner has tested the page before offering it to their users).

Q:   Why does a dashed-line box appear around parts of the page when I start SetSee?

A:    This box we call the region border, and it is drawn around each separate part of the page—a region—that SetSee has determined, after analysis of its internal structure, to contain filterable material (there may be multiple regions on a page, or none). It is drawn to make it clear to you what parts of the page can be filtered. The parts of the page outside the boxed regions are not filtered at all by SetSee and always remain displayed when you are filtering the regions.

Q:   Why does the region border (the dashed line making a box around parts of the page) turn purple sometimes (well, most of the time) when I am filtering a page?

A:    This is done to indicate to you that parts of that region have been temporarily removed from the display, to prevent you from accidentally thinking that the page is “complete” (i.e., unfiltered). If the color did not change, you might take some action based on incomplete information, not realizing the page has shrunk from its original size, and we’d like to try to prevent that scenario.

Q:   When I type a single letter in the SetSee input field, the web page shrinks, since there are some matches (even the metrics show me how many).  But there is no highlighting of the matching letter. Is this a bug?

A:   No, we do this purposely.  We think that few users would like seeing the matched text of just a single letter, and this lets us avoid some performance degradation (since so many items will match a single character).  We may add an option in the future to let you choose to have even a single letter match highlighted, if feedback suggests this is really needed.

Q:  I opened a text file in my browser—a listing of a C program—that I would like to use SetSee on.  But trying to start SetSee, I get the pop-up error  No items could be found to filter.   What’s wrong?

A:   SetSee does not yet work on plain text files, since the algorithm takes advantage of a browser’s internal representation of a web page (the DOM), and text files are not web pages and have no DOM.  But we do hope to support this capability in the future.

However, when a browser opens a local file system directory, it typically renders it in HTML (with a DOM) and so SetSee works on that.  But for this to work, you need to change an option in Chrome for the SetSee extension.  To do so, open the Chrome extensions page at chrome://extensions, and in the box for the SetSee extension, click on the Details button:

Near the bottom of that page, turn on the item Allow access to file URLs:

Q:   Do you have any keyboard shortcuts for using SetSee?

A:      Yes, we couldn’t live without them.

• Alt-Ctrl-s
  1) Start SetSee on the current page, open the panel, and put keyboard focus into the search input field in the panel.  2) If SetSee is already running but you have moved the keyboard focus away from the panel, put it back into the input field.
• ESC
  1) If you are already typing your search terms, this shortcut undoes any current filtering and clears the input field so that you start over typing your search terms.  2) If you have keyboard focus in the input field but have not yet typed any search terms, this shortcut will stop SetSee, close the panel, and remove the region border.  HINT: If you have started SetSee on a page (even automatically because of your Preferences settings), typing ESC-ESC is a quick way to stop SetSee & get the plain web page back.

Q:   I get a pop-up error from SetSee that says  “Sorry, SetSee can't run on this page. Please ensure you are on a normal web page (not a chrome:// URL) and try reloading the page.”

But I am not on an internal Chrome page.  What’s up?

A:    Personal Edition only -   One time that we see this is when you are trying to filter an HTML file local to your computer (Eusing a URL like file:///C:/doc.htm) or a local file on your PC, not a page from the Web.   Also, sometimes we see this if you click on the SetSee icon to start SetSee before the web page has fully loaded.  To get around this, just wait for the page to completely load and try again.

Please let us know if you see it in other instances.

Q:  Some of the sites on which I use SetSee limit the number of items that appear on a page (e.g., when I have done a search on an e-commerce site, or am looking at a list of archived news articles).  Though SetSee is useful on each page containing part of the content I am interested in, I’d like to use SetSee on the entire set of items that the website could show me, but the site does not allow me to see them all at once.  Any suggestions?

A:   Personal Edition only -   Ah, indeed, this is very frustrating.  At this time, the only suggestion we can give you is, on that particular page, to set to the page option number of items per page if the site allows you to choose this number (not all do):

This way, at least you have gotten the most information displayed that the site allows.

We would like to be able to help in situations like this—this is a frequently requested “feature”—but the technical problem in solving this in a general way is difficult and we cannot tackle it at this time.  

One thing you can do is let the site owner know about your wishes (to see more, or all, results), as well as let them know about our Publisher Edition product, which will let them embed SetSee within the page and increase or eliminate the limit they have currently set, or stop using the common technique of infinite scrolling (although SetSee often can handle the page correctly when items are added via that latter technique)..

Q:  Trying to use the Publisher Edition, I copied the snippet of code you offered into the source file of my web page and uploaded it to my website.  But when I load the new page in my browser, I see no SetSee panel that will allow me to search the page.  What is wrong?

A:    Publisher Edition only -   There are 2 possible reasons for this:

• The page you put the snippet in does not have 25 identifiable items in a region (25 is the hr-coded minimum number of items that the Publisher Edition works with).                        
• The free version of the Publisher Edition is limited to being used on 5 pages within any single domain or its subdomains, so the page you are trying to use it on is the 6th one in your domain that you have included the snippet in.  The next major version of SetSee will have a fee structure for the Publisher Edition for websites that want to use it on more than 5 pages.                 

Q:   What are the current bugs you are aware of?

A:    Ah, yes, bugs.

• The ESC key as a keyboard shortcut does not work sometimes.
  The ESC key should work as a shortcut for clearing search terms from the input field in the panel (when pressed once) or for closing it entirely (when pressed twice), but started working inconsistently in late June, 2023.
  ► both Personal and Publisher Edition

Q:   What are some features you are considering for the next release of SetSee?

A:    The following features are at the top of our list:

• It will work with plain text files opened in the browser.

• SetSee will work much more helpfully with web pages containing headings, showing the location of matched items in the overall hierarchy of the page, like a Table of Contents superimposed and shrunk down over the matched text, so you can see the point in the hierarchical structure where the matched item is located..

• The user will be able to click on the lines indicating unmatched text (e.g., “6 paragraphs temporarily hidden by your filtering”) and have the unmatched text exposed, so the nearby context is more visible.

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