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Enter one goat, blazing trails of search results
What's the connection between a tree on an Australian university campus and a new web search utility called Trexy? The answer is: a goat. Specifically the cuddly goat pictured right. Now we all know goats are not cuddly. They are bony, peevish creatures given to butting people. But the idea of Trexy comes from Australia, where they live upside down and evidently see things rather differently.
Trexy was inspired by visionary Vannevar Bush who in 1945 anticipated the web with the concept of a community memory through which adepts could blaze useful trails of information.
London-based Australian Nigel Hamilton, who runs a metasearch site called Turbo10 , got the idea of trying to realise Bush's concept similar by collating search trails from a variety of search engines and set up Trexy with his sister Megan.
If you sign up you get Trexy toolbar on your browser page, and all your search trails are stored on the Trexy servers. One benefit is that you can access a history of your own search trails, with more indication of page content than your get with a browser history listing.
But, by entering search terms in the toolbar, you can also search the trails of other people, on the assumption that they are likely to be seeking the same information you need. Trexy maintains anonymity and you can delete trails you do not wish others to see.
So where does the goat and the tree come in? Hamilton says that at Brisbane University there is a tradition that if flowers from a certain collection of trees falls on a student, he or she will fail their exams. As a result generations of students have worn paths through the trees that resemble goat trails.
'I though that was a good image for search trails,' Hamilton said at the Internet World show. So Trexy the goat became the company logo.
I know a thing or two about goat trails, having spent some time gallivanting in the Himalayas. You follow them at your peril. Some pass under rocky overhangs that look negotiable until you try to negotiate them, when you are likely to break your neck.
More common are trails that are fine until your reach forest, where they split up into a maze of mini-trails between the trees. If you are lucky you may find the main trail at the other side of the wood. If you are not, you could spend a cold night out lost on the mountain. Or die horribly of exposure.
What this says about Trexy, I don't know, but it does not cost you anything to find out. You can download the utility here. At the very least it could be interesting to find what other people are searching for.
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