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 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.[/url]

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Deb Harrison
DVH Design
Essex Web Design

I have become VASTLY allergic to toolbars. It seems everybody wants me to use theirs. If I listened to them all I wouldn't be able to see the browser window for the d*mn toolbars . . . Surely they could have come up with a different format!

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Custom WordPress Themes, CubeCart templates, ModX templates, Movable Type templates. ~ B1tchslappin Political Blog ~ GreenSpeak Community Action

Agreed...with the above...

As well...it takes at least 2 hops to get basic search result...I don't see any advantage using this se...

Kohsis, could you elaborate on the 2 hops?

If you go onto main search (eg use Google or the like as normal) then the Trexy toolbar tracks it and saves it.

So it might be a "toolbar" but no ordinary toolbar.

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Deb Harrison
DVH Design
Essex Web Design

I actually meant the se, not the toolbar...however everyone has a toolbar as the lady states above...which I was agreeing too...

I did a search on momma, hit blaze search trail (1 hop)...I get a list of POPULAR SEs to choose from, so I choose 1 (1 more 'search' hop...then I probably still haven't found what I'm looking for so I have to drill down some more...(1-2 more search hops at least)...

My point was why would I want to use a se that just adds more hops to get to my search results instead of just going to a more noted se...or why not use a search page that eliminates all hops and with at least 97-99% probability will find what I am looking for on the first hop.

It would seem like SEs with less notoriety would try to make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for more quickly and eliminate the extra searching to be a more useful tool...

As well, since I never used trexy before, search my trails did me no good...and I found that search all trails in some of my searches was very limiting...

dunno, maybe I need more time with trexy...

The way I understood this was it stores your useful searches (not used it yet) and also gives you access to other people searches similar to yours if they are public

I think this could be useful for research purposes espically if you own a SE and want to see trends etc. I do hate toolbars (except the Google one) and but if there is a firefox version then I will check this out.

Thanks dharrison for the interesting news update

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Meta Search Engine
Bespoke Software Development

Hi BJ,

Just wanted to let you know that you don't have to download the TrailBar to use Trexy. You can blaze trails using the WebBar by clicking on the red 'Blaze a Trail' tab on the Trexy results page http://trexy.com/blaze/newtrail.txy?. This acts as a spring board to blazing trails.

We really appreciate the feedback, if you have any other suggestions we are really interested to hear them.

We also have a forum, feel free to post us any comments.

Thanks,

Megan