We’re pleased to announce our first external utility to interface with the global bug.gd error/solution database. On Mozilla’s addon site, we just released an extension for the Firefox browser that let’s you search an error message on your clipboard (or one you paste/type) in the bug.gd community error database.

This may become our recommended way to use bug.gd because:

• It’s fast and light, taking up up just a tiny footprint in your Firefox status bar.
• It supports anonymous searching, without an email address. We support this because the extension let’s you track unsolved errors you ran into.
• It quietly also provides stats for your comments/ratings. This is for those power users who might be interested in that (just hover over the bug.gd icon).

As always, the intent here is for people to search bug.gd for errors, but if they don’t find the solution right away, they’re reminded to return and provide a solution when they figure it out. The extension just makes that a lot more natural.

We have plans in future versions to allow you to search your favorite search engine at the same time you search bug.gd, making it more of a win-win search engine.

Download the extension here:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6138

As always, if you have any questions or problems with bug.gd, feel free to email bugs@bug.gd.

We just pushed live a good number of bug fixes for the site. One oft-requested feature has just gone live. We’ve now added the ability to mark bugs with one of the following:

• This was a mistake, please hide.
  
• I gave up on this error and moved on.
• I forgot my solution to this error.
  

We expect this will help avoid things like “whoops forgot” for solutions, and it also let’s people test bug.gd without feeling too guilty (since they can mark a silly search as a mistake).

We’re really excited about the solutions we’ve been receiving and can’t wait to talk more about a cool new feature coming soon. Stay tuned.

We just wanted to take a quick moment and wish you all a very happy holiday season!

Come back and visit for some neat new bug.gd features in the new year.

I particularly enjoyed the review and comments from this blog: http://www.walyou.com/blog/2007/12/14/buggd-may-finally-find-a-solution-for-your-computer-bugs/

It’s great to see people as excited as we are to solve the world’s problems.

We have a number of new features awaiting testing, and a big surprise for the new year. I’ll cover them all in the blog soon, but I suspect you’ll see some coverage on your favorite news sites, too.

Happy Holidays from bug.gd!

We’ve been so busy at bug.gd the past two weeks that I haven’t had a chance to catch up on all the reviews we had.

You can see why we were overwhelmed on the summary page of our news coverage:

http://blog.bug.gd/buggd-in-the-news/

There’s been a lots of discussion on sites like TechCrunch, Lifehacker, and many, many more.

We have some new tools in the works that make life even easier for computer users, so expect that list to get even bigger soon.

Thank you guys for spreading the word. We’d love to see a world where no one was blocked behind a fixed bug.

Today someone reported that they received two emails instead of one. If this affected you, don’t worry– it was a temporary glitch that’s been resolved.

Of course, please continue to report issues to bugs@bug.gd if you run into anything unexpected. Thanks for your support during our beta period, and sorry for any confusion.

As you might have noticed, we’ve released a few new features to bug.gd. I promised to include those here.

The biggest items:

• Added comment display to search results.
• Added ratings display to search results.
• Added Firefox search bar extension. (Install this, please!)
• Added IE7 search bar extension.

We’d love to hear from you here (or at bugs@bug.gd). What do you think?

KillerStartups wrote the first review of bug.gd and we were very pleased by the coverage. In fact, I believe we killed their site for a time when we directly linked to their review during the Digg deluge.

You will be contacted in 48 hours to see how you dealt with the situation, and if you solved you will be asked to submit details on how you did.

It’s great to see that the first reviewer understood bug.gd right away. Some reviewers didn’t catch-on.

Bug.gd is a great site, but maybe it could include some Web 2.0 features.

We have a logo with a reflection! Oh, is there more to Web 2.0?

Users could have a user name and a history of errors that they have dealt with.

For beta, we wanted to see how well we could avoid requiring a login and password. If people really like the idea of non-anonymous names, we can add them, but it might distract a bit from our core search.

Other users could request their knowledge when they deal with a similar error message and maybe they could come to a solution even quicker.

Something like this is being considered. (If you also like this idea, please comment here.)

Bug.gd could feature an articles section on error solutions that users could take advantage of to try and fix their computer problems.

Once we get in the groove, we’ll likely write about the most common error searches. We expect this would be more like trivia for the software industry rather than anything users would enjoy. The average person isn’t so keen on errors unless one is staring them in the face. As such, our focus is almost exclusively on getting a specific error out of your way.

Thanks again to KillerStartups for such rapid coverage and the excellent review.

We’ve received lots of questions, but we’re way behind on responding to blog articles. Let’s see…

I thought I’d take a moment to respond to 5 of the ~90 comments on Digg. (We’ll ignore the humorous comments about our temporary downtime during the Digg deluge. We’re only human!)

anyone notice the logo reflection? — NavS

Hmmmm…

“If you’d like bug.gd for your intranet, please email corp@bug.gd. Full licenses are very cheap and begin around $4999.”
Cheap? $4999? That’s a joke right? — unknamed

Obviously it’s no joke, though the average diggster may not grok it. We are, though, getting emails from IT infrastructure managers and IT outsourcers who “get it” and see how this can be another great tool in their arsenal. Since every large company has custom applications and errors specific to their company and business, it can be a huge timesaver for employees to find other employees with similar errors/solutions. The cost is minor especially with no per-user or concurrent license fees.

In the future we’ll be adding tools that allow your company to integrate it with their software build systems, websites, etc. Why should company engineers and new hires have to send out “has anyone seen this error?” emails? Your corporation should never solve a problem more than once! Get them back to work as quickly as you can.

This sounds link splunk… http://www.splunk.com/ — hm2k

Not so much. Splunk has a great selection of tools– but nothing as simple and direct as bug.gd. I think you’d agree if you’ve used any of the splunk tools.

I don’t see how this is better than just googling the error which anyone with half a brain can do — SeanNorton

Searching for an error message via Google will work sometimes, but Google’s not really designed for that sort of thing. How many times do you end up getting results where someone says “I solved it!” in a forum without an explanation? How many times do you see errors posted but with the results hidden behind a pay site that fooled googlebot? How many times do you have to fix a multi-line error to squeeze it into the “keyword” search boxes?

We were sick of not finding solutions when we know people have been down a path before. If we all work together, the computing world will be a much nicer place.

Sure, some people post in forums or newsgroups. A rare few Samaritans blog about their error solutions. We believe, though, that the number of people posting those are far outnumbered by those who search/solve and never tell a soul. (Let’s stop doing that, please!) bug.gd sends a gentle reminder so you’ll remember to do the right thing.

Should have been included under ‘Favourites’ on IE7 for Vista. — Vazelos

No argument here!

Welcome to bug.gd beta.

Wow. It’s been a stellar week so far.

On Sunday, we wanted to add our logo to the Web 2.0 directory as our first act of launching our beta. Someone saw that, posted bug.gd to Digg and within 24 hours the site hit the Digg front page and was slammed by curious visitors. We weren’t quite ready for the deluge, but we made a few tweaks and were back online piece by piece later that day.

The feedback we’ve received has been wonderful. The site’s been reviewed all over the blogosphere and we’ve received some great emails looking for partnerships and services.

As we catch our breath, we’ll respond to some of the feedback here and make some more announcements. Stay tuned!