The resulting Web page is also intercepted, cached and parsed. The parsing process selects those URLs in the Web page that are already in the KSS URL database. It modifies the corresponding link texts to represent the fact that the respective links have already been accessed. This is done by adding to the link text the number of times anybody in the group has accessed that link. Furthermore, the system generates a full text index of all the pages in its cache.
Users can later query the index, using a local search engine.
The second component of the KSS system, the KSS metasearch engine, performs a similar task but in the context of interactions with search engines such as Altavista, Lycos or Excite. Because the KSS metasearch engine mediates the interaction between the user and the search engines, it can remember the queries asked, and it can remember which result hits users have followed for each query in the past. This in turn allows the metasearch engine to recommend the best search engine to use when queries are resubmitted later on, presumably by other users. In addition, the number of previous accesses is used to rank result lists merged from multiple search engines. Both systems, the KSS proxy and the metasearch engine, can work together, so the data stored in the KSS URL database can be used to sort the set of links in the metasearch engine.