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Blekko is alive

blekko.com

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An interesting example:

http://blekko.com/ws/global+warming+/conservative

http://blekko.com/ws/global+warming+/liberal

Also, really impressive SEO stats. Be sure to check out all the tabs.

http://blekko.com/ws/http:%2F%2Fblamcast.net+/seo

Excellent find, those SEO features really are great, especially for free tools.

My reaction is a big "wha???" I don't understand what is supposed to be done, even after clicking on the "what is a slashtag" link. Maybe I'm getting old? Can the site describe what it does without a video? I hate clicking on videos. Anyhow, that's my reaction, FWIW.

My reaction is a big "wha???"

That was my first reaction. The front page really needs a plain text description of what it does - preferably in a single sentence. I clicked the /about page and gave it a quick glance (as a typical user might do). I don't think a Bill of Rights is something a typical user will slough through in order to use the service.

The other issue is the registration requirement. It may be tough to get users to sign into a search engine in order to tag sites.

With all that said, it looks promising.

Blekko had me at: "You have marked the site www.w3schools.com as spam. it is now dead to you. You will never see it in your search results again."

I have been wanting a search engine that will remove stackoverflow scrapers from my search results for some time.

Really? I've found the site quite useful when I've forgotten some piece of CSS that I don't generally have to remember because I'm not doing web stuff all day.

What site do you use instead? Or do you just have it memorised? :)

Some random thoughts:

I'm really happy to see this open up live. I think it's about time someone tried to "take on Google" - the competition will be great for us users, and it looks like Blekko might be a serious contender.

I love the fact that they've taken the concept of the "search box as the new cli/all purpose interface", and extended it. That's basically what they're doing, after all - giving every user customizable cli commands they can use to search smarter. The big question is, will this kind of thing catch on with "normal" users? I'm not so sure, but I hope so.

I don't understand why they're sticking to the name "Blekko". It's pretty obvious the word they're really pushing is "slashtag", so why not go buy that domain and call themselves slashtag? Makes a lot more sense to me. If you're trying to get people to remember you, and you're spending so much time on pushing the term slashtag, at least make that the way to find you. (And no, Googling "slashtag" only turn up Blekko as a 5th result or so.)

I love that they make their SEO/ranking system very public and very accessible. This is an interesting strategy - developers are more inclined to optimize for the tools they understand most, and developers sometimes drive later adoption.

I lost interest the moment you told me I couldn't sign up because I'm not in one of the 'geographic regions' you opened up. What's the point of that? I could very well just tunnel to a server or use one of my paid VPNs, which I'd actually do if I knew it was of any value to me (as I used to do with Hulu), but since I don't I don't feel compelled to do so.

Edit: I'd argue that you want your service adopted by people instead of them feeling left out because of where they live. Maybe you should have constraints on the number of users and not on where they reside. I can easily see interested parties now not using the service when it's open to them because of this.

We're trying not to go down on launch day like cuil.com did. It's not an exclusionary thing, it's trying to keep the site up & responsive despite a flood of traffic. WolframAlpha hit >2000qps at launch, which would kill us.

Nevertheless, blekko should be open for everyone now...we'll keep it open if we can.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't exclude people for performance reasons. You should do whatever you need to keep your service up and running. I'm saying you shouldn't exclude by geographic location.

I'd rather see a "Whoops capacity for the party is 500 and we're full so you cant get in" instead of "Whoops we have a capacity of 500 and even though we only have 50 people in the party right now you can't go in because you're not from the US".

Anyways, I just signed up and I've got to say I really REALLY like this. I'll try it out for a week before deciding if I'm using it instead of Google, but from what I've seen it looks really good (and I think I will end up using it instead). I do have two things to complain about though, when registering a popup came but telling me it couldn't find my user, though it worked fine after that (perhaps its a known bug), and the 'profile' page would benefit from being either centered or fluid. Great job though!

I love the results, the slashtags, and the awesome metadata, but I hate that the search box is relentlessly autofocused on result pages. This breaks keyboard scrolling and some other keyboard interactions, like hitting backspace to navigate back to the previous page.

Autofocus is fine on the front page of a search engine, but it gets in the way on result pages.

OT: Does it also bother you that Google's Instant has broken the back button on search pages? Back now transfers the cursor to the search box, which is a feature I find incredibly annoying.

Yes, I find this annoying as well.

Looks good. I still think the name is going to be hard to market to the general public.

After I checked out the site a few months back, I couldn't remember the name. It's also hard to say over the phone without spelling it out.

1. It is better to post such an announcement on Monday. Weekends tend to be quite here.

2. I couldn't get what is meant by "slash in" and "slash out" when visiting the main page.

News is news. Don't worry, it will be here tomorrow too.

I was pleasantly surprised to see an indie search engine developer introduce another search engine. If you don't mind me asking, are you involved with blekko at all or just testing it out?

Nope, not involved at all.

This is Monday press... The press was supposed to go live at midnight on Nov 1 (so you can be in the papers on Monday). The Wall Street Journal broke our embargo by 5 hours.

I did a search and it says "1 to 20 /yahoo results for (query)"

Does that mean Blekko is just a nice-looking front end for the yahoo API?

I'm guessing the answer is no and the technology goes far deeper than that, but as an average user with an attention span nearing zero, it might be wise to make all this terminology a bit clearer. I don't want to have to distinguish between slashtag results, yahoo results, web results etc (and learn what they all mean) - why can't I just have results?

We have our own crawl/index/serve technology end-to-end. We have a 3 billion page web crawl, a machine-learning trained ranker, and then the slashtag vertical features. Since BOSS gives us an additional 20-40B pages for very long tail queries, we fall into /yahoo if we don't have any of our own results.

We're auto-firing slashtags for certain regular queries now, e.g. [cure for headaches] will auto-fire /health, [industrial design colleges] will auto-fire /colleges. We're doing this initially for health, lyrics, colleges, autos, hotels, recipes, and personal finance.

Getting the crap from sites like ehow out of the results and pushing results into a curated set of high-quality sites for queries in spammy categories really cleans up the results there.

Hmm, /lyrics in particular doesn't seem to do what I personally want, though I'm not sure how it could easily be fixed. What I want in order of preference is usually: 1. the official lyrics page, if any; 2. lyrics from a fan site, if one exists; 3. lyrics from one of the big ad-filled lyrics sites, like lyricsmode.com, only as a last resort (I tend to put them in the same category as ehow/etc.).

But it seems the /lyrics slashtag explicitly gives me #3, and actively excludes any results from the #1 or #2 categories that would normally come up.

For example, the ideal result for the search [pearl jam spin the black circle], imo, is the official page, http://pearljam.com/song/spin-black-circle. Without /lyrics this is the #4 result, which is decent. But when I add /lyrics, the official lyrics page gets excluded!

This is great. I looks good, feels responsive, works well.

Starting a new search engine seems like crazy, but if anything can win out, this seems like it should.

Who's doing the design work and frontend? How big are you? [Also - just checked you jobs page - what you use Perl for?]

We have a designer (Dan) and a front end team (the Three Musketeers!) in-house. We use Perl+XS for all of the back-end stuff: our NoSQL data store (multiple petabytes of data), crawling, indexing, and serving queries.

It seems like Perl and search engines go together. The other being DDG.

How are results weighted for the search engine in general? It seems to value individual articles vs. sites for specific things more. For example if you search for Minecraft you'll see most of the topic results are individual items, and some of the links are just crazy. The Team Fortress 2 blog (an unrelated game, the only relation is they mentioned Minecraft once in July) ranks higher than official sourced of information? The first link for the Minecraft forum is rank 15, that isn't even a general link it's a specific topic.

The Slashtags idea looks awesome, but the search ranking seems terrible.

I don't think I get it.. The slashing, is this like public bookmarks?

How will they stop spammers / SEO gamers? They say search results shall involve people, but spammers and SEO gamers are people too.

I don't get it either. I tried it out a month or two ago and to me it's just not that useful and doesn't give me anything that delicious, or custom Google search doesn't give me. Or maybe I am just the wrong audience.

My immediate reaction to "slashtag" was: "oh does this somehow tie into searching the slashdot archives?"

Given the CLI syntax we're pushing in the search box, we were looking for a novel way to describe it. "Hashtag" caught on pretty well on twitter, so we figured with the / modifier in front of what are essentially category tags, "slash tag" would be pretty descriptive. It strikes some people as being a cheesy marketing term. Not sure what to do about that though.

You could leverage the popularity of hashtags, since people already use them and feel comfortable with them. IMO I'd rather slash than tag though.

Very cool idea!

I set up a slashtag for "hackers": /zb/hack

http://blekko.com/ws/+/view+/zb/hack

I couldn't really think of what sites to add, so right now its just HN & stackoverflow.

There are a bunch of /blekko slashtags for hackers, including /hacker /cracker /make /hackerspaces.

Nice. Check out a few of the slashtags I have created:

http://blekko.com/ws/+/view+/krishna/startups

Example query: find out something in the "about us" pages of all startups: http://blekko.com/ws/about+us+/krishna/startups

http://blekko.com/ws/+/view+/krishna/yc-startups

Example query: find out all yc startups that mention "ron conway" : http://blekko.com/ws/ron+conway+/krishna/yc-startups

http://blekko.com/ws/+/view+/krishna/pg

Example query: all PG's mentions of LISP: http://blekko.com/ws/lisp+/krishna/pg

http://blekko.com/ws/+/view+/krishna/yc

Example query : stuff about startups mentioned in various YC sites: http://blekko.com/ws/startups+/krishna/yc

Its based on ShashTags and has API. I can not find how to add/edit my SlashTag via an API. Since I run a directory that would really help them, its a bit of a pain.

I do like the search though.

You can embed a slashtag search box on your own site. And you can hit us on rss by adding /rss to any search. We intend to fill out more APIs after the launch. The goal was to first get the site open to humans..

To create slashtags from your existing data, you can paste in lists of links, or upload a text file containing links.

Like some of the others, I don't get it either. I think this is curated search results? I don't grok.

And the name is ... blech-o? I'm not mocking or making fun, I'm just saying.

Pretty cool. How long before they get acquired by Google?

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