A find engine provides a user with access to information via a find interface and a keep interface. The find interface accesses both a content search index and a personal search index; the keep interface accesses personal search index. The content search index lists document content, user generated content, and semantic vectors; the personal search index lists user generated content, user explicit gestures, and user implicit gestures. The user explicit gestures comprise keeps that are captured via the keep interface and that consist of any of one or more documents and sites from among the search results to which the user ascribes significance by affirmatively keeping the document or site. The keeps are preserved as one or more persistent search objects and the search results returned to the user are ranked and/or returned in response to the query at least in part in accordance with the keeps.