The Sins of Search: Lust

Over the next couple of blog entries I'm going to uncover some of the sins of search: lust, vanity and sloth.

Trexy is a human-powered search engine. The data in our system is generated by real people which means Trexy tunes in to what people are *really* searching for and the reality is a significant proportion of searches are 'lustful'.

For example, one day we saw a succession of searches for: "hairy toes" -> "hairy toes midget" -> "hairy toes midget sex". Scary!

We thought momentarily about filtering this type of trail but then realised that we would be putting ourselves up as the arbiters of good taste. Provided it is not illegal, we will not censor the content of a trail. It is up to the individual trailblazer to decide whether or not they want to share these trails anonymously. Remember you can always delete a trail or turn trailblazing "on" or "off". The next version of the TrailBar will allow you to toggle between private and shared trails easily.

Trexy behind the firewall?

Lots of people have asked us if Trexy works behind the firewall?

At one conference a group of librarians from Boeing were lamenting about the political, technical and organisational problems of integrating information across different sections of their organisation.

For example, the description of how to replace "Wing Nut 334FVGA" on the Apache helicopter might be buried in various searchable manuals. A Boeing technician may need to search multiple intranet databases to retrieve this information. When the technician retires, the knowledge of how to replace "Wing Nut 334FVGA" goes with him. Next time there is a problem with "Wing Nut 334FVGA" it would be good if the new technician could follow these previous trails rather than doing the same searches over again.

Trexy could help organisations, like Boeing, by recording trails across their internal intranet search databases. At the moment we are actively looking to partner with large intranet search companies to license the Trexy technology.

More Good News from Linux World

Trexy was included in Computer Active over the weekend.

To read the article, click here.

Also, we had a new TrailBar download from another new country - Syria.

Trexy at Linux World

We exhibited at the Linux World Expo here in London on Wednesday and Thursday. We had a great time and met some lovely people.

Nigel gave a talk in the products and services session.

I met up with some journalists and here is what one had to say about Trexy.
Trexy offers fresh look at search - PC Pro.

We also had our Trexy Pub Trail at the Hand and Flower Pub. Thanks to all those who came along! Check out the photos here.

The International Information Industry Awards 2006

Trexy has been shortlisted (top 4) for The International Information Industry Awards 2006 in the category for the Best Speciality Search.

Winners will be announced on the 29th of November in London.

We'll keep you posted.

Turbo10 Cluster Turns 50!

Turbo10.com, our sister engine, has experienced a large increase in load recently. The Turbo10 search network is now receiving more than 1 billion searches per month. To service this load we have had to increase the size of the cluster to 50 nodes.

We've learnt lots of hard lessons about web scalability in the past and maybe one day Trexy will need 50 nodes too.

Tiny Trailblazers

My son has to take his favourite toy to nursery today for "Show and Tell". The catch is a parent has to come and show off their favourite toy too.

My son has decided to take along his toy red car - which means his poor Trexy is staying at home.

But not to worry - guess what my favourite toy is? I'm taking along 20+ Trexy's to give to his class.

Nigel to speak at Internet Librarian

Nigel will be speaking at the Internet Librarian conference today in London. In the session, “What’s New with Search”, Nigel will be giving a quick Trexy demo.
I hope it goes well!

Where did I find that?

Last night Nigel and I gave a talk at a CILIP meeting.

Here is the outline for the presentation:

"In 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote what has become a classic article on Memex, a system for organising the worlds knowledge through the development of data bases linked by human trail-blazers.

It became one of the inspirations behind the World-wide Web and modern search engines. The Hamiltons have gone a step further: they created technology allowing people to follow both their own search trails and those of others, without having to worry about how they answered those elusive questions.

Megan and Nigel will discuss the origins of their idea and reveal how to follow search trails. Nigel is the CEO, co-founder and technology expert of Turbo10 and Trexy.com.

He previously worked as an intellectual property barrister and information systems lecturer. Megan is Marketing Director of Trexy. She is a qualified lawyer and marketing specialist."

Version 2 Coming Along

I'm busily working on version 2 of Trexy. There is some major refactoring going on behind the scenes and we're looking forward to bringing out a new version ASAP. If you have any suggestions let us know now so we can include them in the next release.

Nigel shares his search vision at ad:tech

This is a photo of Nigel speaking at the Ad:tech conference in London last week.

Trivia Trouble!

Question number 12 on last night's FAB trivia quiz certainly threw a spanner in the works.

It was good we had so many techies on hand to spot the error.

The question should have read: Choose the next number in the sequence: 101, 1010, 1111, 10100.

Feel free to email a question for next month's Pub Crawl.

Check out some of the photos from last night below.