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 ...

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.