The FAB Continues to Grow

It was great to see so many new faces at the Flag and Bell last night.

It was terrific that so many of the regulars could make it too.


We started out at the Porterhouse and walked up the alleys of Covent Garden to the Fuel Bar.

This month there was a clear winning team of the trivia quiz, which proved to be quite tricky for even the most knowledgeable techies.



Hope to see you all in October. For details visit: flag-and-bell.com

la

BBQ - Memphis style.

Yesterday the Trexy team took time out together for a BBQ. Nigel's new Memphis style Barbie was certainly the talking point of the afternoon. The pink cooker was filled to capacity.
Hopefully we can do it again soon.

Man down on the Trexy team!

Trexy 'The Inflatable Goat' is currently undergoing some serious surgery, as he copped a real battering in San Jose.

The girls and I accidentally managed to burn a hole in his foot. This plus the other injury he sustained in Edinburgh were all too much for the little fella to take.


The good news is he should be back with us soon. They just need to keep him in 'inflatable animal' hospital over night until he is fully repaired and back on his feet.

Trailing to the Guardian

Trexy is featured on The Guardian Unlimited site.

Danny Sullivan Does Sumo

It was a lot of fun to see Search Engine Watch's Danny Sullivan in the Sumo wrestling ring at the recent Search Bash Party in San Jose.

Back From SES San Jose

We just got back from the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose.

Here are the girls on day three of the conference at the Trexy booth.



We also had our traditional Trexy Pub Trail in San Jose before heading to the Search Bash party at Studio 8.

We all had a lot of fun and met some lovely people. Thanks to everyone that came and visited us at the booth.

Watch this space for the lastest pub trail photos.

Trexy makes it to India

Trexy is written up in the Hindustan Times, India's most comprehensive vortal on politics, business, new economy, entertainment, fashion and lifestyle.

Click here to read the article.

Search Engine Strategies (SES) - San Jose

One of our American search engine partners excitedly told us, "if you only do one Show this year - it's just gotta be San Jose!"

Well the San Jose SES conference is opening and the Trexy booth is open for business and ready to go. A special San Jose version of the Trexy Pub Trail has been organised too.

Paper, Scissors, Rock Decides Winner at the 4th FAB

This month's Trexy Trivia questionnaire proved trickier than usual. With two teams tying for first place, we were forced to play
the best of three rounds of paper, scissors, rock.



Diana and Debbie battled it out until Debbie made the winning move.

Glad everyone could make it.





Details for the next Flag and Bell.

Trexy gets a mention here too.

Trexy featured in the 'Today in the library blog' too.

http://gsublog.govst.edu/mt/librarynews/

Trexy gets a mention in German

Trexy is making its mark in Germany too!

http://www.at-web.de/blog/?p=642

It's Official!

We really enjoyed the BCS Summer Party where Trexy was officially announced as a medallist of the British Computer Society (BCS) IT Professional Awards 2006.


Check out our press release and also take a look at what the BCS had to say about the awards.

Trexy Heats Up

It was a very hot week last week at the Rotherhithe office with temperatures in London reaching their mid 30's. This week is no exception.

As Jennifer quite rightly explains, "we feel like pizza's in a wood fired oven!"

We are eagerly waiting for our fan to arrive this afternoon in time for the expected 40 degrees on Thursday! Bring it on!

BCS Summer Party

Nigel and I are off to the BCS IT Awards Summer Party.

We are really excited that Trexy has been awarded a Technology Medal in the Services section.

The awards have been divided into 4 sections:

- Business Achievement Awards for Excellence in IT Management

- Technology Awards Individual Excellence Awards

- Professional Development Award

- President's Award for 2006

We are looking forward to meeting the other medallists.

Add an Engine

Here at Trexy we already record trails blazed on over 3,000 different search engines.

But now we've taken that even further by putting together a way for you to add engines to our database yourself without any hassle.

Using the new Add an Engine feature, it only takes two steps to add an engine to Trexy:



1. Enter the address of a search box into the form.
2. Enter a search into the search box when it has loaded into the form.

You're done! You can start blazing a trail. This is another step in our quest to make Trexy ever more useful. Stay tuned for more news as it comes...

University Partnership

I've just come back from an enjoyable day sharing ideas about trails with an academic from the University of Nottingham. We're going to write some papers together over the next year. It's been a while since I put my academic hat on and it was fun devising some of the research questions we need to answer and the best methodology for answering them. There are many avenues of research open to us but we both share a strong intuition about the fundamental nature of information retrieval: it's not about the information - it's how people use it that matters. If you like your ideas to come in academic form then stay tuned. I'm still looking to forge other research partnerships so if you're an academic interested in trails then get in touch!

SES London Video Clip.

Here is a short video_clip of Nigel and I at SES London.

Searching for a Missing Trexy

Yesterday, I received an email from a distressed parent regarding her tale of her two year old's missing Trexy...

Greetings from the USA. I'd stumbled (near literally) upon you guys at the SE Conference in NYC back in March. Took home one of your goats which quickly became the favorite toy of my daughter... go figure, guess this next generation (she's two!) will be blazing search trails with Trexy? We have however hit a dilemma in our relationship with this goat.

You see... Trexy went missing last night. Thus, leaving me to ponder the question of how to locate this beloved and rather explorative goat. Since Trexy is known to blaze trails, how will we know where to look? I have contemplated the missing person ads... though I haven't a current picture of the goat, rather straggly by this date after being snuggled and slept with by a two year old. He is a beloved goat nonetheless.

His bachelor adventure (not sure if Trexy is male, though we seem to have marked him as so), into the night caused quite a stir! While he was frolicking somewhere... my daughter, who doesn't quite talk, was desperately searching our house while calling out something that in its garbled form sounded a lot like "Trexxxxxxxxy".

Bedtime was delayed and a full search of the premises was launched. All of us searched, calling for Trexy... wondering where he had blazed his next trail to. So on to a serious solution to these hazards of mascot ownership.... how can we get another goat? Or perhaps a backup supply in general? The trail blazer that he is, how are we to ensure he won't run off again... I will be pleased to post links to Trexy, rants and raves everywhere I have the power to and my daughter promises to be a good goat owner.'

Regards,
Kristen

Don't worry. Trexy is on his way in the post Kristen!

Flag and Bell Gets Hotter

It was a stifling hot evening as we boarded the Queen Mary for our 3rd Flag and Bell event.

The river Thames was a great location to enjoy a drink in the sunshine with fellow techies and watch the sun go down.



For details of the next Flag and Bell in August visit: flag-and-bell.com

A LoveMark(R) for Perl

I had a great time at the recent Perl conference in Chicago.

Perl is my favourite computer language and there are thousands of lines of Perl code behind Trexy.

For a long time Perl's branding strategy has been confusing. This is a problem, not only in the mind of the consumer, but a law court will not uphold a confusing or deceptive trade mark.

In the absence of a clear branding strategy the Perl community adopted "The Camel" from the cover of a Perl book written by Perl's inventor, Larry Wall. The problem is, "The Camel" logo is owned by a book publisher, O'Reilly and Associates - not The Perl Foundation. Oops.


While I was at the conference I had meetings with Larry Wall and other Perl luminaries to see if something could be done about it. Fortunately they were quite receptive to the ideas in my proposal: "LoveMarks(R) for Perl".

Over the next six months I hope to see The Perl Foundation adopt my proposals.

Visit From Planet Yahoo!

Google and Microsoft have both downloaded the TrailBar, now its Yahoo!'s turn!

[search@dev ~]$ whois 209.191.87.219
[Querying whois.arin.net]
[whois.arin.net]
OrgName: Yahoo!
OrgID: YAOO
Address: 701 First Ave
City: Sunnyvale
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94089
Country: US

NetRange: 209.191.64.0 - 209.191.127.255
CIDR: 209.191.64.0/18
NetName: A-YAHOO-US3
NetHandle: NET-209-191-64-0-1
Parent: NET-209-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS2.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS3.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS4.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS5.YAHOO.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 2005-05-20
Updated: 2005-07-21

RAbuseHandle: NETWO857-ARIN
RAbuseName: Network Abuse
RAbusePhone: +1-408-349-3300
RAbuseEmail: network-abuse@cc.yahoo-inc.com
OrgAbuseHandle: NETWO857-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: Network Abuse
OrgAbusePhone: +1-408-349-3300
OrgAbuseEmail: network-abuse@cc.yahoo-inc.com
OrgTechHandle: NA258-ARIN
OrgTechName: Netblock Admin
OrgTechPhone: +1-408-349-3300
OrgTechEmail: netblockadmin@yahoo-inc.com

BoF In Chicago

Nige will be holding a Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting in Chicago at the Perl Conference today.

You never know, Larry Wall might even come along!

Chicago Perl Conference

I'm flying to Chicago this afternoon for a Perl conference where I'll be giving a short presentation on The Goo. The Goo is a system that helps us 'stick things together' behind the scenes at Trexy and Turbo10.

Trexy is programmed in Perl 5 and I'm looking forward to sharing some of the ideas behind The Goo with the Perl conference as well as learning about the upcoming Perl 6.

Should be fun!

Good vs Evil Trails

I really enjoyed speaking to a group of academics at City University the other day.

Ideas were flying all over the place. One of the students thought the "emergent trail algorithm" (i.e., the Goat Trail Algorithm) might turn out to be inherently 'evil'! We then had a polite disagreement which boiled down to a difference in personal philosophy - are people inherently good? or inherently bad?

I personally believe people are inherently good and that we are not only 'wired' to make discoveries but also to share them with each other. Human language, for example, was a discovery to help us share discoveries.

Although we disagreed about good and evil we both agreed that humans are inherently lazy. That is, given a choice, the majority of us will take the path of least resistance.

So there we have it - my ideal trail algorithm brings out the good in people while taking the path of least resistance. Let's see if we can get there. Stay tuned ...

Nige to talk at City University

Nigel will be speaking at City University in London tomorrow at 1pm.

Hope it goes well!

Collapsible Trails

Talking of new features. We've also added the ability to collapse and expand trails:

"The Feature" Finally

I finally added the feature that we started at the WWW2006 Conference.

You can now "Edit a Trail" by clicking on the "Edit" link in My Trails.

The new feature means you can:

• add your own searchable description to a trail
• highlight individual steps in the trail
• delete individual steps in the trail
• delete the entire trail
  
• choose whether or not to share your trail with others

Let us know what you think? Your feedback and comments are much appreciated.

More features coming soon ...

Catwoman meets Trexy

Catwoman from Thomson Local came to visit us at the Trexy stand at the recent London Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference and Earle took her around the Cycle of Search Game.

Fishing in the Deep Net

I'm really happy to see trails being made into the so called "Deep Net".

I just did a search on "fish" and found this result:


This is exactly what I hoped would happen. Here we see trails using different topic-specific search engines (e.g., recipezaar.com and walmart.com). Trexy is starting to uncover the "deep" resources searchers use to find results - great!

More Trailblazers From Around The World

We have had over 8000 downloads of the TrailBar to date.

Some more countries that have started trailblazing are:

Ukraine
Mexico
Chile
Denmark
Austria
Luxembourg

Some Mentions After WWW2006 - Edinburgh

Here is some coverage resulting from the recent WWW2006 Conference we attended in Edinburgh.

We all had a great time and Nige even got an interview on BBC24!

Check out a video of Nigel being interviewed by Joyce Lewis from the University of Southhampton:
http://www.zepler.tv/multimedia/ipod/www2006-4-Pod.mov

Here are some other mentions:

WWW2006 and me!:
http://www.netresources.co.uk/www2006-and-me

Watch a video of Trexy at the booth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMp6pnqaQ5I

Our Second F.A.B. Night

We had our second Flag and Bell event at Canary Wharf last night. The Wharf was expecting us and it was great to see some new faces.


As usual, we blazed a trail to three pubs, all within walking distance from the first pub, Bar 38. It was great that the sun came out for us.

If you missed this one, don’t despair. We are already looking forward to the next Flag and Bell on Tuesday, 4th of July.

Flag and Bell - You're invited.

Tomorrow we're having another Flag and Bell. If you're in London tomorrow why not come along!?

Working with Academia

About three years ago I went to the University of Nottingham to give an invited lecture and also met Ted Nelson (father of hypertext). We had a great lunch where we discussed the Memex etc.

One of the guys I met at the lunch came to visit us at the Trexy stand at the WWW2006 conference and through some sort of weird serendipity told me that he had just completed his PhD on search trails. We've decided to work together on various research projects including an optimal algorithm for ranking trails.

I'm also working with the University of Edinburgh and hopefully Birkbeck here in London. If you're an academic interested in search trails research - now is the time to get in touch!

Roadshow Rolls On

We're off to another conference!

Today we're exhibiting at the London Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in Islington. If you're in London why not come and see us? We're holding another pub trail this evening too.

Bizarro Bug - Bites the Dust

For the past three days we've been tracking down a nasty bug and yesterday morning I had it in my sights.

The bug is intermittent and is hard to catch in action - especially on the cluster where the number of machines helps to hide its presence. When we finally replicated the conditions in which the bug appears, fixing it was fairly straightforward. Phew. One more nasty bug bites the dust.

"What happened to the feature?"

The new feature we planned to release by the end of the WWW2006 conference hasn't quite happened yet. That's the bad news. The good news is the design is complete and the coding has well and truly begun - so expect the new annotation feature soon.

We've met lots of great people and had a lot of fun while sharing the serious ideas behind Trexy.

Blazing a trail through Edinburgh

We had the first Trexy Pub Trail in Edinburgh last night. We had a great time and about 60 people joined us as we blazed a trail to three pubs.

Everyone seemed to be having a lot a fun, and some struggled with the Pub Trail Trivia that we handed out. Some of the tricky questions included:

Which one of these people was beheaded in Scotland? No! It’s not Mel Gibson in Braveheart, but actually Walter (Sir) of Lennox.

But the question people seemed to struggle with most was where the Y in Trexy comes from. Is it coincidence that Trexy rhymes with sexy? Maybe not...

Thank you for everyone that came along, it was very nice to meet you!

We’ll post some pictures soon!

Trexy Launches at WWW2006 With a Bang!

Trexy made a dramatic start to the WWW2006 last night. Trexy popped while we were inflating it! It was a sorry sight )-:


Fortunately we had the emergency repair kit to hand and Trexy was back in form for the start of the conference today.

CiteSeer just WWWorks

CiteSeer is an excellent 'deep net' search engine for research papers in computer science. Many of the attendees at the upcoming WWW2006 conference will be familiar with it but probably don't realise that they can record their search trails on it too.

Its been a little while since I've gone delving for academic papers but it was great to see that our adapter to CiteSeer is still working fine! This means researchers who install the TrailBar will remember their own trails and can follow the trails of others.

You are invited to the Trexy Pub Trail!

You are invited on a pub crawl following the official WWW 2006 reception on Wednesday night in Edinburgh Castle.

Drinks are free and everyone is welcome to come along. Pick up your free drinks token at the Trexy stand (no. 13).

We will visit three pubs and spend about 45 minutes at each. All pubs are in walking distance of the Castle. There will also be a pub quiz and a prize to be won.

When: 9 pm Wednesday Night, 24th May 2006
Meeting Spot: Gatehouse - Entrance to Edinburgh Castle

Look out for the flag.
Hope to see you there!

"Add a Feature" Live @ WWW2006

We're heading up to Edinburgh next week for the WWW2006 Conference. We're going to add a feature to Trexy live at the conference in the exhibition hall. What new feature would you like to see? Add a search engine? Annotated trails? Metatrails? Our trails? Goat trail algorithm? Trailblazer profiles?

We will choose the new feature on Tuesday and from there it will be design, code, test and go live by the end of the week - all while exhibiting at the conference. Scary. How many bugs can we make in one week?!!

Seriously though we hope to engage with the attendees at the conference and hope they come by to see how things are going! It's not often you get to see inside a search engine.

Welcome Earle

Earle Martin has joined the programming team. Welcome Earle!

Some More Mentions After Internet World

Trexy.com: New Search Trails -
http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/Informer18.pdf

Search Trails: A New Concept of Search -
http://www.dvhdesign.co.uk/blog/2006/05/search-trails-new-concept-of-search.html

The Search Continues -
www.hyperhappen.com/archive/article/81/

"The Fun Booth" at Internet World

Today we are back in the office after three exciting days at the Internet World exhibition in Earls Court, London.

We set up on Monday night in readiness for the opening day on Tuesday.


There were a couple of hundred exhibitors at the show and thousands of visitors.

Nigel gave a talk on the first day in one of the exhibition theatres. His topic was: Bookmarks, Tags, Favourites - What next? Search Trails. Learn how to enhance your search technique.

The whole Trexy team were there to meet people and help people to play the 'Cycle of Search' to win a plush goat toy.

We were voted as the most fun booth at the exhibition too. You can see a picture of our booth below.

We look forward to the next exhibition in Edinburgh, WWW 2006 , at the end of May.

Battle with the Bugs

We uncovered a really, really nasty bug yesterday. I don't want to go into all the details (it would take all day) but it relates to versions 1.5 through 1.8 of the Firefox TrailBar. Internet Explorer users are not affected. If you installed the Firefox TrailBar for the first time with one of these versions then trails were not recorded properly. This has now been fixed in the 1.9 release available here: http://trexy.com/trailbar.html.

First F.A.B. Pub Trail - London

It was our first Flag and Bell (F.A.B) Tech Pub Crawl last night. Thanks to all who came along!

Topics of discussion included managing beowulf clusters, dot com dramas, the new AMD chip, AJAX, beer, babies, OS X, Solaris, Linux, Java, Perl, MUDs, and search technology. It was great to hear first-hand feedback about Trexy. Spring is here and there is a buzz in the air. We're already looking forward to our next Flag and Bell starting at 6pm on Tuesday the 6th of June at Bar 38 in Canary Wharf, London. If you're in London come along!

Our First FAB Night

I'm looking forward to our first Flag and Bell networking event tonight. The idea behind the event is to meet like minded people interested in web technologies.


We are meeting at the Horniman Pub near London Bridge for 6pm and will go to two pubs after that.

It will be interesting to see who comes along as we haven't had many registrations. I will post some photos tomorrow.

It's Official - Trexy Girls are Geek Girls!

We had an enjoyable evening at our first Geek Girls Meeting in London last night and met other ladies in technology.

From left to right: Jennifer, Rena, Anna and Megan.

Through to Round Two

Good news - I just heard that we are through to the next round of the British Computer Society's annual BCS Technology Awards 2006 . The next stage involves a site visit, which means two judges come to our office to learn more about the technology. This should be some time in the next couple of months.

And Then There Were Six

Anna le Roux, our new marketing person started today.

Anna is from Pretoria in South Africa and has been in London for just one month.

We wish her all the best in her new role at Trexy and look forward to working with her.

First Trexy Pub Trail in the UK

We had our first Trexy Pub Trail in London last Thursday.


It followed the 28th European Information Retrieval Conference 2006 that Nige and Sven attended.

Spring Clean Before Easter

It's Easter this weekend and we are having a Spring clean in the Rotherhithe office this afternoon.

Our new Marketing Assistant is starting next Wednesday so we need to re-arrange the office to accommodate the fourth desk.

It is also a good opportunity to file away the growing number of folders too.

When we finish we are off on a Trexy Pub Trail. Nige and Sven at the ECIR conference http://ecir2006.soi.city.ac.uk at the British Computer Society and we are going to meet them for a drink before Easter.

Speakers' Corner

I've always wanted to have a go at "Speakers' Corner". Speakers' Corner is a legendary place in Hyde Park in London where anyone can get up on a box and speak. Whether or not you get someone to listen to you is another thing - but it's a great place for sharing ideas.

So I couldn't resist the opportunity to participate in a "Speakers' Corner" session at the ECIR in London last night. It turned out to be great fun. The audience consisted of information retrieval (IR) experts from around the world and they quickly grasped the idea of trailblazing and the algorithm for optimising trails.

Speaking at ECIR

I'm really looking forward to sharing Trexy.com with the ECIR Conference here in London this afternoon!

I've got my presentation, posters and handouts at the ready ... now all I need is a soap box.

800,000+ Trails

Wow that came quickly!

Now let's see how quickly we can get to 1,000,000 Trails!

Trexy Inflates in Record Time in Munich

Thanks to our new electronic inflator, Trexy was fully inflated in 3 minutes - a 17 minute gain on the old one!

Trexy at SES Munich

We had a great time exhibiting at the Search Engine Strategies in Munich last week. We met some great people and had another successful pub trail.

Sven spoke in the session "Der deutschsprachige Suchmarkt – neue Player stellen sich vor!" and introduced Trexy into the European market.

Here are some interesting German articles about Trexy at SES:

http://www.at-web.de/blog/?p=505

http://www.ojobuscador.com/2006/04/03/trexy-guarda-tues-huellas/

Trexy has Landed

Click here to listen to a radio interview with Meg and I by landed.fm.

Visitor from Planet Microsoft

We've had many TrailBar downloads from Google but it seems Microsoft like the idea of trailblazing too ... ;-)

search@skippy:~> whois 207.46.98.142

OrgName: Microsoft Corp
OrgID: MSFT
Address: One Microsoft Way
City: Redmond
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98052
Country: US

NetRange: 207.46.0.0 - 207.46.255.255
CIDR: 207.46.0.0/16
NetName: MICROSOFT-GLOBAL-NET
NetHandle: NET-207-46-0-0-1
Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: NS1.MSFT.NET
NameServer: NS5.MSFT.NET
NameServer: NS2.MSFT.NET
NameServer: NS3.MSFT.NET
NameServer: NS4.MSFT.NET
Comment:
RegDate: 1997-03-31
Updated: 2004-12-09

RTechHandle: ZM39-ARIN
RTechName: Microsoft
RTechPhone: +1-425-882-8080
RTechEmail: noc@microsoft.com

Trexy on Tour

We're going on Tour.

1st Birthday Blog

The blog is one year old today!

And what a year it's been ... we started the blog because we wanted to share a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into creating a new search engine: the trials and tribulations.

The past year has seen lots of perspiration and some inspiration. If you've been following along you'll know that the march to our BETA release was long and arduous. The battle with the bugs raged all year:

• Bugs Run
  
• Cluster Growing Pains
• Basket cases
• Day 4 Bug-a-Thon - Brain Drain
• KISS This Bug
• WebTrailBar War
• Got it!

We had some 'environmental' problems too:

• Wireless Wipeout
  
• Baton down the Hatches

But it has also been a lot of fun! During the year the team has more than doubled in size:

• A Special Day
  
• Welcome Sven
  
• Then There Were Five
  

For the first time there were more than two people at the office Christmas party!

All along Meg and I have pursued the dream of making a useful search engine that fulfills the trailblazing aspects of Vannevar Bush's 1945 vision.

It was really emotional when we finally hit the "Go Live" button: Trexy is off and Trailblazing.

But we didn't send Trexy out into the world without protection. We had already prepared the company and our research and development efforts were recently rewarded with some patently good news. It wasn't long before Google paid us the first of many visits.

The competition is fierce but The Goat is now well on its way! Looking forward to more trails and tribulations next year ...

More Trailblazers From Different Countries

The latest countries to start trailblazing are:

Poland
Japan
Sweden
Lebanon
Iran
Brazil
Thailand

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

Hot Off The Press

We've had some interesting articles written about us since the SES conference in New York. You can check them out here:

Roundup: Search Engine Strategies: http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/results/article.php/3589231

A Goat Blazes the Trail at SES: http://www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=35919

Trexy – Rhymes with “Sexy”: http://blog.xodp.org/blog.html

Trexy - Suchanfragen speichern und teilen: http://www.at-web.de/blog/?p=467

Creating Trails in the Blogosphere: http://reblogger.wordpress.com/

Trexy Sees Trails with new Technology: http://www.adotas.com/2006/03/trexy-sees-trails-with-new-search-tool/

If you spot any articles about Trexy, it would be great if you could let us know.

Goodbye Jeeves. May The Force Be With You!

Nige and I say our farewells to Jeeves at the Code Red party in New York.

It's How You Throw It.

We had a great week exhibiting at the SES conference in New York last week.

It was the first time we've put our Cycle of Search board game to the test.

To win a soft goat, exhibition attendees needed to throw a hoop on one of the hooks on the steps in the Cycle of Search. So it is essentially quoits.

Standing over a meter away from the game, it was great to see all the different throwing styles.

Variations included:

• The overarm slammer - powerful throw that quite often sent hoops flying
• The gentle toss - timid throw that sometimes fell short of the game
• The upsidedown shaker - dramatic inverted underarm throw
• The reverse frisbee toss - emphasis placed on spinning.

We were glad that people could play it in their individual ways and win.

We designed the game so conference attendees could take the Cycle of Search for a spin and think about the psychology behind how we search for things in everyday life.

To play the game we asked people to give us their business card, given we gave out over 350 goats, you can imagine we have a bit of follow up to do.

Trexy on Show

We've had an intense two days! Here's a quick summary:

• Trexy has been well received and the media is beginning to pick up the story
• Met lots of partners, old and new
• Meg did an interview for the Washington Post. We're both doing a radio interview this afternoon.
• Hundreds of people stopped by our booth
• 350 Trexy soft toys have found new homes
• The first ever "Trexy Pub Trail" took place last night
  

The news is spreading around the blogosphere too:

• http://www.pandia.com/sew/181-trexycom-old-idea-gets-new-life.html
• http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-03-01-n56.html

Bye Bye Jeeves

Last night we had a great dinner with one of our partners and then it was off to a club called "Code Red" for the AskJeeves party.

By the time we got to the party it was well under way. We were wondering how Ask.com was going to say goodbye to Jeeves and it didn't take long for us to work it out. Two Star Wars Stormtroopers stood ominously on stage guarding a lifesize bust of Jeeves frozen in "carbonite". Bobba Fett stood guard too in a scene reminiscent of Han Solo's carbonite freezing by Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars Episode V.

We were a bit sad to see the end of a trade mark ... but then that's how the audience felt when Han Solo was frozen. Could Jeeves come back one day?

Meg and I couldn't resist getting one last photo of Jeeves. Coming soon ...

1 Day To Go

We've all made it to New York and amazingly all our "stuff" made it too. The team spent the morning setting up the booth and we're really happy with it.

350 soft Trexys have also arrived - that means we have to give out one every three minutes. Let's see how we go ... the booth opens for business tomorrow for two days. There are very few exhibitors with pure search engine technology, the majority of booths are selling complimentary pay per click products and services.

Tonight we're off to dinner with a partner and the AskJeeves party. I suspect 'Jeeves' is going to get his final send off ...

2 Days To Go

Thanks for all the well wishes! We're off to Heathrow. Hang on. Where is that Goat?

Got it!

Some of the biggest bugs have the smallest causes. It turns out the "monster bug" was caused by an invisible carriage return character "\r". Got him!

3 Days To Go

We spent most of yesterday tackling a "monster" bug. The Web TrailBar is primarily meant to demonstrate how Trexy works without the user needing to install a TrailBar first. Generally it works well but on some web pages it inexplicably locks up. Strangely it works everywhere except on the Trexy cluster. Normally we don't like to sleep on a bug but this one is nasty. For me the best time to kill bugs is between 5am and 6am in the morning - it's 5:35am now and I've got this one in my sights!

Apart from that everything is coming together. Meg just sent me an email from Australia. She's going to jump on the plane soon to New York. I'm ready to go to New York too but that bug isn't coming with me ... ;-)

4 Days To Go

The team has divided up all the "stuff" we need to take to New York. Rena is taking something that looks a bit like an electric guitar, Sven is carrying the "Cycle of Search Game" strapped to his back, Jennifer has lots of bits and pieces and I'm taking a 1.5 metre tall inflatable goat. I can imagine U.S. Customs pulling us aside for an explanation, "so what's all this about?!"

In more developments, the Yahoo adapter is turned back on after temporarily failing. If you want Trexy to adapt to your favourite search engine you can suggest it here. From time to time a search engine's adapter can break, if you find a broken search engine adapter email: support@trexy.com. It's good to see Yahoo back!

New Internet Explorer TrailBar

The "Sign In" feature has been added to the IE TrailBar. Click here to download the IE TrailBar.

5 Days To Go

The SES Conference is coming. Yesterday we sent out an invitation to the press to come and visit our booth and a number of journalists have already booked appointments to see us. Exciting!

On Wednesday night of the conference, we're holding the first "Trexy Pub Trail". Instead of holding our own launch party we're organising a mini pub crawl from the hotel to the party of a Big Search Engine. So we need to come up with a good trail from the hotel to the party. The weather will be cold so the trail won't be too long and won't involve long treks through the snow. It could even be as short as lobby bar one -> lobby bar two -> party. But it will be fun!

On Sunday night we're meeting an old friend who lives in New York to do pub reconnaissance.

If you're coming to the conference, visit booth 2510 and pick up your invitation to the "Trexy Pub Trail".

Patently Good News

The international examination of our search trails patent is complete.

After much deliberation and scouring the prior art the patent examiner has decided that all our patent claims are inventive, novel, and commercially useful!

The whole process has taken over two and a half years and we will now proceed to register the patent in most industrialised countries. This is the result of six years of research and development effort in search engine technology.

This means we are in a stronger position to compete against the big boys! After all, Google has already downloaded the TrailBar three times. ;-)

Meg and I have put so many years of effort into developing the technology behind Trexy, we want to give Trexy the best chance of commercial survival and a patent is just one of many ways we are protecting our idea.

6 Days To Go

We're heading down to the Ivory Wharf office today. Lots of preparations are under way for the SES Conference in 6 days time.

A new version of Firefox (1.5.0.1) has just come out and I've integrated the new "Sign In" system with a new version of the TrailBar (version 1.8).

Click here to download the most recent version of the TrailBar (1.8) for Firefox (1.5.0.1).
We are releasing a new version of the TrailBar for Internet Explorer soon too with the "Sign In" option incorporated. We've had an impressive number of people sign up already! This is definitely going to be a big part of our service and it needs to be tightly integrated with the TrailBar. It's really exciting to see everything coming together.

Meanwhile my personal trail database is growing and for me the system becomes more useful every day! I hope you're experiencing the same thing?

7 Days To Go

There are only seven days to go before our big launch at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in New York.

Everyone is busy putting together the final touches for the booth, organising meetings with our partners (old and new), writing press releases, killing bugs, preparing the cluster and generally getting excited.

Everyone has been wishing us well - even my dentist is getting excited!

Tomorrow the Cycle of Search Game arrives back - now we just have to work out how to get it on the plane ...

Got a Second?

One second is a looong time in a user's search experience. And we think it's too long for you to wait to see a calendar of your previous trails. So over the past three weeks we've been speed testing different calendars. We tried using 3rd party calendars but they were just too slow. So in the end we wrote our own bespoke calendar from scratch. And here it is, a sub-second calendar for viewing your search trails (there's a new sign in feature too):

Let us know what you think?

Meg's Off!

Meg jumped on the plane to head back to OZ today.

She's been working flat out getting the booth ready for the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in NY and our BIG launch. She's heading off to a friend's wedding in Australia first though.

The next time we see her will be in New York in late February!

Sign In Turned On

A new sign in feature has arrived. You can now blaze trails on all the computers you work on and they become part of your MyTrails collection. Here is the sign in screen:

I work on up to four different computers per week and I was suffering from trail "blackouts". "I'm sure I have a trail for this!??" Now all my trails across all the computers and all the search engines I use are remembered. Cool!

You can sign up at Trexy.com.

Feature Freeze Hots Up

There's nothing like an impending feature freeze to heat things up. We've been working on lots of new features in preparation for our big launch at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York in late February.

Here are just some of the new features that are on the way:

• MyTrails Calendar
• MyTrail Summary Stats
• Trailblazer Sign In
• Meta Trails
  

Check out the new MyTrails Calendar and Summary Stats:

The calendar means you can quickly jump to all your trails on a given day, "I know I was searching for that last week," and the My Trails Summary Stats shows how your personal database of trails is growing.

Any ideas for more features? Let us know what you think? More new features coming soon ...