Sunday, April 03, 2005

Where do Trails start?

Trails start when you enter a search query into a search engine.

A trail is the path from what you're looking for to what you find.

At the moment we express what we're looking for in about 2.5 words by plugging them into the nearest search engine. It's testament to the cool computer science behind the scenes that out of the 20,000,000,000+ documents out there anything relevant comes back at all!

So this is where the trail begins - 2.5 words and we're away. Diving into billions of documents:
Browsing like mad through the results, scrolling down the page. Is that a spam link? Hmmm. That one looks dodgy? Ok, I might follow that one ... I'll just keep looking to the bottom of the page. Scroll. Scroll. This looks better. Ok. Oopps. No. No. No. That's not it. Better go back. Back. Back. Back. Where was the good one again? Is that it? That's it. Ok. Finally found IT!!
And that's only if you get lucky!

Browsing is a big part of the time spent searching which is why much of Turbo10's design is aimed at making browsing faster.
Trexy is aimed at not wasting all the browsing effort that millions of human searchers put in every day. We can all benefit from each other's searching and browsing efforts, provided your privacy is protected - this is the idea behind All Trails.

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