Ever one to be easily pleased, I have to say I’m delighted with the progress of the specialist search engines!

In the graph below you’ll see the daily search figures for ALL specialist search engines over the last 2 months (click on the graph to make it bigger). This shows a doubling in use. That figure is slightly mis-leading as the main TRIP has also seen a significant increase in traffic. However, the PROPORTION of searches across the TRIP specialist search engines has increased 40% relative to the main TRIP search engine.

So are they taking off? I think so! We get more e-mails about the specialist searches than the main TRIP, even though they account for a relatively small amount of traffic. That coupled to the increases makes me fairly positive about the future. We’ll shortly be releasing HTML search boxes for each specialist search (allowing webmasters to add specialist search boxes on their own sites), this can only add to usage. Also, we’ll be hoping to announce a number of improvements towards the end of 2008.
  • So if you have any suggestions for improvements, let me know!