Trexy

» see trexy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

By 2006 the browser toolbar was already a compromised object. Half of them arrived uninvited, riding in on something else you had downloaded, and the normal condition of a shared machine in a Turkish internet cafe was three or four of them stacked above the page, each taking a centimeter of a screen that was not large to begin with. Trexy was a toolbar with a genuinely good idea inside it, which in that particular year was very close to a disqualification.

Nigel and Megan Hamilton, Australian siblings working out of London, launched it in early 2006. You installed a plugin and it sat over whichever search engine you happened to be using, more than 3,000 of them by the middle of that year, quietly recording what you searched for and which results you opened. That record was a trail. Trails were searchable and they were publishable, so instead of starting at an empty box you could walk somebody else's route through a subject.

Nigel Hamilton was careful never to position it against Google. The line he gave was that Trexy complemented your existing habits, and that the more engines it connected to, the more of your searching survived being spread across them. It was not a search engine. It was a layer under all of them, holding the part that every one of them threw away.

The blog went quiet after September 2011 and the service stopped functioning in early 2012, with no post announcing it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a trail actually recorded ~

A search engine remembers the query. Trexy remembered the query and the click, in sequence, which are two different objects. A query is what you thought you wanted. The click is what turned out to be worth opening, and the sequence between them is the part where you were wrong twice and then found it.

That sequence is the only durable artifact of a research session, and in 2006 nothing kept it. You closed the tabs. If you came back in six months you started over, re-typed roughly the same query, and clicked roughly the same three links, having learned nothing from the last time you did exactly this. Trexy's proposition was that the second pass should be free, and that somebody else's first pass should be available to you as well.

~ the memex line ~

The name compresses trails and memex. Vannevar Bush wrote "As We May Think" in 1945 and described a machine on which a researcher would build associative trails between documents and pass them to other researchers, so that the path through a body of knowledge became a transmissible thing in its own right. Sixty-one years later two people in London shipped a browser plugin against that specification, on a web Bush had no way to imagine, and it more or less did the thing.

In July 2006 the British Computer Society made it a medallist in the services section of its IT Professional Awards, which is the correct institution to have noticed. What the citation cannot cover is that the memex was designed for a world of scarce documents where finding anything was the hard part. By 2006 the hard part had inverted completely, and a tool built to preserve the route to a document was arriving into an era whose actual problem was that there were nine thousand documents and no reason to prefer any of them.

~ go live again ~

The blog's own titles tell the last few years better than any obituary could. There is a post from March 2011 headed "Go Live, Again!", which means the service had already been down at least once and had been brought back by hand. A few more posts follow through that summer. The final one is dated 15 September 2011.

Then nothing, and by early 2012 the site had stopped working. That is a two-person company running out of the energy required to keep restarting something that was not paying for itself, which is the most common cause of death on this entire site and almost never the one written on the certificate.

~ what search kept instead ~

The trail did not die as an idea, it just stopped being yours. Google Web History was already recording the same sequence by 2005 and keeping it in-house, and the click path became the raw material for ranking rather than a document you could hand to a colleague. Every engine now knows exactly what Trexy wanted to record. None of them will show it to you in a form you can pass on.

So the surviving version of the memex is the one Bush would have found least recognizable. The trails exist, in enormous volume, and they belong to the company that logged them. The part he actually cared about, one researcher building a path and giving it to another, turned out to be the part with no business model attached, and a browser toolbar out of London was the last serious attempt to ship it to ordinary people.

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