Time for Action in Search

Transactions are the third type of search which are yet to be developed and explored by search engines.

Sometimes when you search you are looking for a way to do something: buy a present, book a flight, send a tweet, sell something, resolve a bug you're working on, send an email etc, search a topic-specific search engine etc.

Wouldn't it be good if your search engine provided a quick way to perform actions?

There is no reason why some search keywords should not become search commands.

That's why the "Do" section of Trexy's result pages are for taking actions related to search keywords / commands.

In the past month I've added over 1,700+ actions to Trexy. They are mostly actions to search other engines like Google, Wikipedia and many more.

This means you can quickly search Google - by starting your search with the search command "google". For example, searching Trexy for "google cars" shows all the Google action buttons related to "cars".

Search actions work by automatically submitting details to web forms. Does your website have a form where a user can perform actions? Why not add the action to Trexy?

Dynamic result pages: Find, Learn, Do

Research shows there are three types of search: navigational, informational and transactional. That's why Trexy result pages are divided into three sections: Find (navigational), Learn (informational), and Do (transactional) for a given keyword.

The order of these sections now changes depending on the search keyword. For example the Do section appears first on the "Buy Car" result page - as this is clearly a transactional search. Currently the "Buy Car" results page enables user's to quickly search AutoTrader to buy a car.

Other queries are navigational in nature. "Facebook", for example, is currently one of the top 10 searches that users enter to Find the social networking site facebook.com.

In the last month I've focussed on the Learn (informational) section. It is clear from listening to our users that the natural way to solve informational search is through question and answers. As  a result I've changed the learn section so you can quickly add your question to a keyword page. Here are the latest questions - can you help answer them?

New release: Find, Learn, Do

I've just released the next version of Trexy. 

In this release I've added some interesting features: search action buttons and user added content.

Trexy's results now appear in three sections: find (user trails), learn (user content), do (user actions). These are designed to equate with the three different types of search intent: navigational, informational and transactional. 

User actions enable the user to click on bespoke "action" buttons in the search results. This is really exciting as users can define one-click actions to help other users perform transactions fast! I'm looking forward to seeing how our users will put this to good use.

Your feedback is very welome: support@trexy.com.

Go Live - Again!

Here we go again!

I'm happy to announce that a new version of Trexy has just gone live. ;-)

We've learnt lots of lessons from our previous versions and made many changes, from the backend engine, to the new user interface and a simpler strapline:

find what others found™.

Finding what others found is the essence of the search trails idea: recommending results based on the search behaviour of others.

It is still the aim of our engine - to safely share search intelligence for the benefit of all users. Our new engine merges user search trails with crawler-based results to re-rank and describe search results.

We hope Trexy helps you find what others found. Your feedback is very welcome: support@trexy.com.

Stay tuned for more developments.

Trexy still on the Trail

We've just updated our blog and we're updating more behind the scenes too.

We are changing the way Trexy intersects search trails and the way the search results are presented. It's been great to see the recent trail/click path patents from the big players like Google and Microsoft - further confirmation that we were on the right trail from the beginning way back in 2003.

Flag & Bell Gets Spotted in the TNT Magazine

The Flag and Bell Summer Party 2009 made it in to the TNT Magazine this week. Congratulations to Andrew McDonough who has been spotted below:



For a closer look, check out page 14-15 of the latest TNT edition.

Trexy & T10 in the Amazon Computing Cloud

Check out what Nigel had to say at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Start-up event today. Watch the podcast here.

Jeeves Strikes Back

Meg and I were there when they froze him in carbonite like poor Han Solo in the Empire Strikes Back.

But just like in the movie I thought it won't be long before he gets unfrozen again. Fortunately the good side of the force must have won in the Ask marketing department - and I'm happy to say - Jeeves is Back! 

A question answering search engine interface still sounds like a good idea to me.

May the force be with you Jeeves.

Flag & Bell Group on LinkedIn

The Flag & Bell has a network group listed on LinkedIn to help our members stay in touch and explore business opportunities.

Interested in joining? Please visit our profile site here: The Flag & Bell IT Networking Group.


Thanks to everyone who came along to the Flag & Bell event in April.

The winning team this month received four cinema tickets. Thanks again to the TNT Online IT Jobs Portal for sponsoring the quiz prize.

We are looking forward to our 3rd birthday party in May.

Turbo10 -> T10 = search engine + ad network

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Flag & Bell Marches in to Spring

We hope everyone enjoyed the March pub crawl in Soho.

Thanks again to Tarpon Aspire and TNT Online for sponsoring the Flag & Bell this month.

A FAB Start to 2009

The first Flag & Bell networking event for 2009 was held last night.

We started out at the Albannach Bar, made our way through Trafalgar Square past the frozen fountains to the Texas Embassy Bar.

It was great to have Jennifer over from OZ to share her FAB flag skills for the night.


Once again, I would like to thank our January sponsors:

* Tarpon UK

* OwnAFilmCompany.com

* TNT Online

Also, good luck for one of our member's new online eShop: Sleepstar.co.uk, selling sleep masks and earplugs.

Details for the next Flag and Bell coming soon.

Flag & Bell Christmas Party

Thanks everyone for coming to the Flag & Bell Christmas Party. This month's pub crawl took us from Waxy's Little Sister pub around Leicester Square and back again to the Crooked Surgeon pub.

We'd like to thank TNT Online for sponsoring the main quiz prize again this month. Congratulations again to Peter for winning the top prize. We'd also like to thank Eleonora from Bond Marvel for shouting a round of drinks and food at the second pub.

A big thank you also goes to our resident magician Steve, who performed a nail biting, russian roulette style trick involving 5 toy guns!

Nigel and I would like to wish all the Flag & Bell members a very Happy Christmas. We look forward to more FAB events next year.

A FAB Time in Soho

Last night's Flag & Bell IT pub crawl took us through some backstreets of Soho. We started out at the Nanobyte Pub and then moved to The Couch Bar on Dean Street.


Thanks again to TNT Magazine for sponsoring drinks at the first pub and the top quiz prize. Congratulations to Peter's team for picking the lucky slip out of the hat. I hope they have a good time watching the Australian vs Barbarians rugby match at Wembley Stadium. I hope the Aussies win :-)

For those people interested in attending TNT's IT networking night next week on Wednesday the 19th, please find all the registration information here.

Details for the Flag & Bell Christmas Party coming soon...

Emotional Engineering

Emotional engineering sounds like something out of a Jaguar car brochure but I've long thought that software engineering needs to consider emotions too:

• The Emotional Programmer
• Care-o-Meter
• "Search your Feelings Luke"
  

Later in the week I'm attending a lecture at the British Computer Society on 'The Computation of Emotions in Man and Machines'. All these ideas are helping in the design of the next version of Trexy - not to mention the Sins of Search.

Once Around the Block

The pubs at this month's Flag and Bell networking event were so close that we needed to create our own crawl between the two by walking around the block. Fortunately, we found an alleyway that took us past some historic sights including: St. Botolph's churchyard and the Victorian Turkish Baths.

Thanks to everyone who came along to the October F.A.B. and helping to make it a great night.

Once again, thanks to Paul and PCR Recruitment for sponsoring drinks at the first pub.


We're looking forward to the next F.A.B. in November. Nige and I are attending Ad:Tech 2008 in New York on the first Tuesday in November, so we'll hold the next F.A.B. the week after on Tuesday, 11th of November. Venue details will be posted soon at the Flag and Bell.

Ad:Tech 2008

We had a busy and successful week exhibiting Trexy and Turbo10 at Ad:Tech 2008.

We launched Ad Trails, our new advertising product at the two day exhibition in London. Nige also gave a presentation titled: Ad Trails - Matching Ads to Search Desires.

Nigel and Marty also managed to squeeze in a bit of not-so-hard rock guitar at the show too.

Big Week Ahead

Nige and I are getting ready for a busy week ahead.

We have lots to prepare for:

• Nige is speaking at the annual Search Solutions Conference
  
• Sponsoring a Trexy Pub Trail
  
• Exhibiting at Ad:Tech 2008
  
• Nige is also speaking at Ad:Tech
  
• Meeting up with partners, and last but not least,
  
• Launching our latest Trexy product - Ad Trails.

F.A.B. 'Internet-assisted' Quiz

This month's Flag & Bell trivia quiz saw some of the teams reaching for their mobile phones!

As you can see I was too busy trying to read the quiz let alone catch people out. So instead of trying to stop people using the Internet, from now on, if your wetware isn't up to answering the question you can reach for some software too - it's a technology group after all.

Looking forward to the next one.

SNAP! Stretching the Elastic Computing Cloud

Trexy successfully migrated to the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (ec2) a few months ago.

Last month I migrated the much larger Turbo10 cluster (our sister search engine) into the Cloud. Turbo10's advertising network currently receives over 30 million search hits per day and close to 1 billion searches per month, so its capacity requirements are much higher than Trexy.

We launched over 20 machines in the Cloud to service Turbo10's incoming load and were alarmed when many of the machines turned red. The load was way too high. "Quick! Launch more machines!!"

Then suddenly we received this message from Amazon, "Sorry - machine quota exceeded." SNAP!! It seems we'd stretched the 'elastic' in elastic computing too far. What followed was an anxious wait until someone from Amazon manually increased our quota.

Things are now running fine and both search engines are now happily situated in the Cloud. Phew!

Now I'd better get back to designing the next version of Trexy ...