So, from our temporary HQ (aka Gordon’s study), I would like to thank all of our test users – you are very valuable to us. I would also like to thank our development team for getting this across the line in difficult circumstances. We all deserve Better Internet Search and we are well on the way to delivering this with your help. I would also like to acknowledge the Next Generation Internet Trust for continuing to support us and helping us to make the Internet a better place for all of us.
Better ad-free searching just got better!
Today we released our Alpha Version 2.1 with better search and more search features. As well as searching webpages you can choose to search for products, images, videos and maps.
All of our Alpha 1 users have now been migrated over to Alpha 2.1. Invitation codes to join the Alpha 2 ‘club’ will been sent out tomorrow to those of you that expressed interest in joining our test programme. If you did not pre-register but would like an invitation code we are happy to send out more as nothing (major) has broken yet – please note your interest here.
It has been a big week considering we began remote working on Monday and had scheduled the Alpha 2.1 launch for today. Maybe we could have done with a little more time for testing, but we made it and anyway you can help us find some of the little bugs if we missed them!
One area of our plans directly affected by the current need for remote working and social distancing is our lab-based testing. As well as the remote testing, we normally conduct a lab-based session for each release where we gain direct feedback and can observe users trying different features of the search engine. This is normally followed by a group chat (an informal focus group) over some pizza. We have found this very helpful while developing the product and so we have a new plan for how we can do this remotely (probably without pizza). I will send out details of how we plan to conduct these tests later and it would be great to get some fresh new users involved in this exercise – watch this space.