Search Trails: A New Concept of Search
Once a year, I venture out of the office. This year it was to attend the first day of the annual Internet World Exhibition at Earls Court 2. It wasn’t really just to get hold of every corporate freebie that was on offer, there was a good amount of seminars that were both informative and innovative.
The seminar I made found the most interesting was the Search Trails seminar run by Nigel Hamilton (previously of meta search engine Turbo10), Founder of new company trexy.com. The seminar sounded promising. It was talking about a new concept of search beyond adding favourites, looking at histories and tagging.
And I wasn’t disappointed. The seminar started off with confirming with what I had thought for ages: Search engines might be great but now with approx the number of web pages in Google’s colossal database past the billion mark and still growing, searching for a particular item or service, is now becoming a little bit time-consuming. The “Add to Favourites” function is only good if you do not have many "Favourites" links to remember (I currently have roughly 200 web pages in my Favourites list with 23 sub-folders) and History involves as much messing around and searching for the term on a search engine.
So what’s the option? Where do you find the most recommended Britney Spears site? Where was that Mobile phone Accessories site you were looking at 2 weeks ago? This, my friends is where the Trailbar steps in.
By downloading the trailblazer toolbar, this sits in your browser and like the tracking programs that are used in web analysis packages, it logs each search term you make. Therefore if you need to recall it at a later date, you can by logging in and searching through your list. You also have the opportunity to make any of your searches public to other Trexy users or just keeping them to yourself.
Alternatively if you are looking for a certain term (eg Britney Spears) simply type in your search phrase and you get a list of all the search paths that fellow Trexies have used to find the same term.
So could this end up being yet another list of useless information? I don’t think so. OK in a couple of years time you could get more than 1 listing for your chosen search term, but the search paths will be listed in order of popularity and search paths that aren’t used will be taken out altogether.
As Trailblazer was only released officially on Tuesday, the Trailblazing community is still in its infancy. But don’t let that stop you. Anything that is going to help with making online search easier won’t stay new for long.
So what are you waiting for? Download the Trexy toolbar today at http://trexy.com/trailbar.html and you will see what I mean.
The seminar I made found the most interesting was the Search Trails seminar run by Nigel Hamilton (previously of meta search engine Turbo10), Founder of new company trexy.com. The seminar sounded promising. It was talking about a new concept of search beyond adding favourites, looking at histories and tagging.
And I wasn’t disappointed. The seminar started off with confirming with what I had thought for ages: Search engines might be great but now with approx the number of web pages in Google’s colossal database past the billion mark and still growing, searching for a particular item or service, is now becoming a little bit time-consuming. The “Add to Favourites” function is only good if you do not have many "Favourites" links to remember (I currently have roughly 200 web pages in my Favourites list with 23 sub-folders) and History involves as much messing around and searching for the term on a search engine.
So what’s the option? Where do you find the most recommended Britney Spears site? Where was that Mobile phone Accessories site you were looking at 2 weeks ago? This, my friends is where the Trailbar steps in.
By downloading the trailblazer toolbar, this sits in your browser and like the tracking programs that are used in web analysis packages, it logs each search term you make. Therefore if you need to recall it at a later date, you can by logging in and searching through your list. You also have the opportunity to make any of your searches public to other Trexy users or just keeping them to yourself.
Alternatively if you are looking for a certain term (eg Britney Spears) simply type in your search phrase and you get a list of all the search paths that fellow Trexies have used to find the same term.
So could this end up being yet another list of useless information? I don’t think so. OK in a couple of years time you could get more than 1 listing for your chosen search term, but the search paths will be listed in order of popularity and search paths that aren’t used will be taken out altogether.
As Trailblazer was only released officially on Tuesday, the Trailblazing community is still in its infancy. But don’t let that stop you. Anything that is going to help with making online search easier won’t stay new for long.
So what are you waiting for? Download the Trexy toolbar today at http://trexy.com/trailbar.html and you will see what I mean.
Posted: 11 May 2006
2 Comments:
Interesting concept Debbie and sort of approaches the "finding things" problem from a different angle to del.icio.us
My only concern is installing yet another toolbar that's going to vie for space at the top of my browser with Google, Yahoo and Alexa. You see my problem?
Another option could be Squidoo. Again, another angle. Squidoo want "lensmasters" (taht's you, me and the rest of Jo Public) to focus on our areas of expertise and point out all the great sites that cover a particular topic - there's other stuff to incentivise people to take part.
Then again there's Google Coop, which seems to be very much akin to Squidoo, but by the looks of it much more complicated - so that could be it's death knell.
Would love to hear more about any talks you attended.
Oh, and if you want to add more links to stuff about Iomart in my blog to feel free. If it helps other get to know about Iomart I certainly have no objections!
Hi Richard
I posted this same article on a forum I contribute to and that same comment came up.
In the end, Megan Hamilton (co-founder of Trexy) said that you didn't have to download the toolbar to use Trexy. Her solution can be read at the bottom of http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=63548
HTH and thanks for viewing and commenting :)
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