New Firefox TrailBar Version - 1.4

Sven and I uncovered a residual bug in the Firefox TrailBar™ when searching on Trexy.

If you search on Trexy, trailblazing was accidently turned off for the rest of your browser session on other search engines. The easiest solution is to install the latest version of the TrailBar (1.4).

Trexy on Lockergnome.com

Just saw this blog entry on lockergnome.com by Mitch Keeler.

You can check it out at: http://channels.lockergnome.com/web/archives/20060113_trexy_trailbar.phtml

Trexy Goes Plush

After going through various stages of production Trexy has finally emerged as a soft toy. It was a lengthy and on-going process but well worth the effort.

Version 1: Looking good but the plush not quite what we had envisaged.

Version 2: Getting there. Need to change the colours under his ears and hooves.

Version 3: Final samples arrive from China.

Very happy with the result, we just couldn’t resist having our photo taken with them.

(L-R: Jennifer, Megan, Rena)

Fancy a Date?

We have just added a new function to the results pages on Trexy. You can now click on the date to see all the searches you did on a particular day.

You can also click on the date in an “All Trails” result to find what other anonymous trailblazers have looked for on a given day.

For example, I searched on "marketing merchandise" in All Trails.

By clicking on the date the trail was blazed, I can see that the Trailblazer had also searched for "point of sale display stands" and "display stands" which is relevant to what I was looking for.

We hope this new feature will help users find trails quicker and open the door to more information.

We are keen to protect our users' privacy. All Trailblazers are anonymous. We only display the date and country flag of the Trailblazer. For more info read Nige’s posting on privacy matters.

Stay tuned for the calendar feature in My Trails...

Sven Goes Prime Time

Just developed some photos from our work Christmas function. We celebrated Christmas by going to Greenwich for lunch.

We jumped into a black taxi from the Ivory Wharf office and went straight to Greenwich Park. From here you get a great view of Canary Wharf and the rest of London.

We went into the Royal Observatory where Sven ripped off his Santa hat and performed a daring act on the Prime Meridian.

Sven



(L-R: Rena, Jennifer, Sven, Megan, Nigel)

After this spot of tourism we walked back down to Greenwich for Champagne and something to eat.

Meta Trails - I Need Them

"What is a meta trail?", I hear you ask. A meta trail happens whenever you follow your own or someone else's trail. This is the main point of Trexy: follow the your search trails or the trails of others to save you time.

As more meta trails are laid an efficient "meta" trail from A to B emerges. This is an optimal way of binding a search term to a great result efficiently. This is how ants distill the optimal trail to a result (food!) but human's do it too. This simple observation about human discovery, is the basis of the goat trail algorithm.

Stay tuned for the implementation of meta trails coming soon ...

Great Scot!!

We are seeing a big increase in new trails! :-)

Check this out for a mega-trail. This is an American trailblazer looking for a scottish famous shortbread recipe.

Google Just Can't Get Enough

We've just had another visitor from Planet Google downloading the TrailBar. They must be starting to like it! We hope they come in peace! ;-)

Firefox TrailBar Downloaded from 64.233.172.40 [US]:

search@skippy:> whois 64.233.172.40

OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgID: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US

NetRange: 64.233.160.0 - 64.233.191.255
CIDR: 64.233.160.0/19
NetName: GOOGLE
NetHandle: NET-64-233-160-0-1
Parent: NET-64-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
NameServer: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 2003-08-18
Updated: 2004-03-05

RTechHandle: ZG39-ARIN
RTechName: Google Inc.
RTechPhone: +1-650-318-0200
RTechEmail: arin-contact@google.com

Trexy Starts Waving The Flag of Flags

Since going out on Mozilla we've had over 2000 TrailBar downloads from all over the world. The countries include:

* Hungary
* Great Britain
* India
* Malaysia
* Netherlands
* United States
* New Zealand
* France
* Canada
* Australia
* Belgium
* Egypt
* Slovenia
* Portugal
* Slovak Republic
* Switzerland
* Germany
* South Africa
* Ireland
* Italy
* Czech Republic
* Bolivia

To start waving your country's flag download the TrailBar today.

Is Trexy "Spyware"?

The "spyware" label gets liberally applied nowdays, often incorrectly.

Spyware is software that does something secret or clandestine. It spies on you without your knowledge.

Trexy is totally upfront about what it does. It is one of our software principles that at all times we let you know what the TrailBar is doing. If you have concerns please read our privacy policy and my personal undertaking.

Trexy remembers your search trails and anonymously shares them with others. This is what Trexy does!

It doesn't do it behind your back secretly "spying" on you. We are totally upfront about its function and have gone to great lengths to design a system that balances the privacy concerns against the utility of a search engine that fulfills the trailblazing part of Vannevar Bush's Memex vision.

If you don't like what Trexy does - don't use it. But please don't call something "spyware" when it isn't!

Our Future is in The Stars

We're having an 'interesting' experience publishing the Firefox TrailBar via the Firefox Extensions Area.

We waited patiently for over two weeks for our extension to be reviewed so it could be cleared for publication. When it was finally published we instantly received a zero star rating :-(. A user named "daniel" made a fair comment about the TrailBar not being hideable - the fix was simple and is included in the latest release. But unfortunately his accompanying zero star rating has dragged us down ever since.

The next reviewer came along and gave us four out of five stars! Now, that's more like it. :-)

But then a Mozilla "editor" mysteriously came along and deleted the four star rating, while leaving the negative review untouched. So now we're back down to a rating of one star. :-(

I'm not really into astrology but our current one star rating reads like a Horror-Scope.

On the positive side our star rating can only improve and we're determined to make a useful product that makes your life easier, and is tuned in to your searching needs - now that future is in the stars.

FireFox Extension is Taking Off

Downloads of our FireFox extension are starting to take off! :-)

1245 TrailBars have been downloaded in the last week.

Two people left feedback to say they would like the ability to hide/unhide the TrailBar. So we've added this function in the 1.2 release which you can download here.