Trexy was an

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

-based

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

metasearch engine A metasearch engine (or search aggregator) is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. S ...

established in early 2006. The website was founded by Nigel Hamilton and Megan Hamilton. It allowed users to record and share "search trails" of their activity on

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

s. The trails themselves were searchable, allowing users to save time when searching by examining the pages found by other users. A design goal was also to allow easier searching of the "

deep web The deep web, invisible web, or hidden web are parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard web search-engine programs. This is in contrast to the " surface web", which is accessible to anyone using the Internet. Co ...

". The service ceased functioning in early 2012. The site was used by installing a

toolbar The toolbar, also called a bar or standard toolbar (originally known as ribbon) is a graphical control element on which on-screen icons can be used. A toolbar often allows for quick access to functions that are commonly used in the program. Some ...

in the user's

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

which recorded the user's activity on search sites that Trexy was aware of, which in mid-2006 numbered in excess of 3,000 search engines. The technology was inspired by

Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime ...

's 1945 paper

As We May Think "As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in ''The Atlantic'' in July 1945 and republished in an abridged v ...

, in which he described his idea of a machine called a

Memex Memex is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of ...

: a Memex would augment one's memory and searching powers by helping to create and share "trails of association" between things in the "common record". The name "Trexy" was derived from ''trails'' and ''memex''.

Awards

In July 2006 the

British Computer Society Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

announced Trexy as one of the medallists in the Services section of their IT Professional Awards.

References

External links

* {{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120205002222/http://trexy.com/ , date=February 5, 2012 , title=Trexy Defunct British websites Internet properties disestablished in 2012 Internet properties established in 2006 Defunct internet search engines