On Tuesday night, I found a way to work around the Firefox crash that was holding me back from doing a proper launch of PeteSearch (by switching to getElementByName() rather than getElementById() for the technically minded).

I started off by posting to the outer-court.com forum, once I heard back from the guys there that it all seemed to be working for them, I contacted John Battelle and Gary Price. They’ve both been very generous with their time, in Gary’s case despite just having just got married on Sunday, and being about to head on his honeymoon! Congratulations Gary!

That lead to a lot of traffic, and some more blog mentions, notably from Pete Prestino, and a couple of French sites, Brainsfeed and NetWizz

It was really nice to see other people as excited about the idea behind PeteSearch as I am. I’m convinced there’s a lot of ways to improve search interfaces, it’s good to see people are looking for something better than the current passive page full of links.

What was really helpful were all the ideas for improving PeteSearch. Gary mentioned that the split-screen view was too hard to close, which I  plan on fixing with a button on a small bar at the top. I might add some other options there too, I’m reluctant to have a typical always-on toolbar since I don’t want to suck up users valuable screen real-estate, but a transient bar there seems a lot less annoying.