What is Trip up to, apart from:

We are actually incredibly busy recoding the site! Much of the site’s code is over ten years old (ancient in internet terms) and, due to the way the site has evolved, the underlying code structure is a bit of a mess. This is a 6-month project and we’re probably two-thirds of the way through. The advantages will be massive and will make future developments much easier to implement.

We have also been doing some amazing work around easily identifying content. This is a much more powerful version of out SmartSearch and uses clever things like knowledge graphs. While work started before Covid (?BC) the crisis has created funding opportunities and – via our work with Oxford – has reinforced the usefulness of the approach we’re taking. This work will also form the basis of a larger bid to fund a rapid-review system that can generate systematic review quality answers.

Oh yes, finally, a few years ago we started working with a couple of academic centres to explore improving our search results. It’s taken a while (so much so I forgot about it) but they have recently shared their results – and they have been able to massively improve the search results ‘in the lab’. So, when we’ve got all the coding redone we’ll start to test it on the live Trip.

So, while on the surface nothing much is changing, behind the scenes things are changing massively – as ever Trip is always an exciting environment to work in!