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]
Search Trails: A New Concept of Search
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