

Blekko suddenly became really good looking. - jayzalowitz
http://blekko.com/#?q=google

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wilg
I'm not sure about that... Aesthetically it looks like something from 2005,
and it's incredibly cluttered.

The light blue and lack of underline on the result titles makes it really
difficult to read or skim them. The results are also vertically very close
together. Sliding panels are weird, it feels like it's hiding relevant
information. Three different fonts that don't go together. The two icons in
the search box are different shades of gray. It doesn't feel like a website
that an actual designer put together.

Also from the perspective of actually using this as a search engine, I can't
really figure out what advantages there are over Google. It seems like the
only difference is that things are grouped into categories. And the categories
aren't even relevant. Look at a search for Arrested Development
(<http://blekko.com/#?q=Arrested%20Development>) (one of the suggested
searches on the homepage). Some links are categorized into "Movies", others
"TV". Also, "Top Results" is for some reason second from the top.

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greglindahl
It's not just the UI, the interesting part is the categories. People have been
trying to do clustering/categories for 15 years, and the results have usually
been laughably bad!

When you have categories, you can present diverse results (maybe I wanted
apple recipes when I typed Apple?) and you can avoid query reformulation when
a query turns out to be overly generic.

Here's an example:

<https://blekko.com/#?q=hearing%20loss>

Now I don't know if you're interested in alternative medicine or not -- and
we've got those results separated so you can either read or ignore them.

You'll probably wonder why we have both health and hearing in this result. The
hearing category is websites dedicated to hearing, while health contains more
generic health websites.

All of this doesn't work perfectly -- the [Arrested Development] movie/tv
example is a good example of how we go wrong sometimes.

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mvkel
Agreed with the sentiment here. Looks like a (non-designer) developer read up
on some flat UI blog posts and did his/her best.

Not the worst showing, but certainly not "really good looking."

~~~
jonathanjaeger
Borderline unreadable compared to Google/Yahoo/Craigslist/Reddit/Hacker
News/any other site with a list.

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languagehacker
Not really. Why on Earth does stuff like this make it to the front page? It's
literally a link to a search. It's not news. There's no further analysis. It's
just the submitter's opinion. Oh look, something new happened to a search
engine no one uses. Time to let everyone on Hacker News know.

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tokenadult
I couldn't even get search results to show up until I turned off blocking of
Google Analytics in Ghostery. Then I could see what search results turn up,
which is always my first test of any search engine.

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jabbernotty
I do not know how the page used to look. But I think, given the 'nestedness'
of the information they want to display, this is not a bad way to go about it.
To make things feel a bit less cluttered, I would make the category buttons an
equal width.

(I'm confused as to why a seach on 'lama' doesn't give the animal category)

~~~
greglindahl
The categories are selected using the web graph, not using a semantic
database. Lama has so many categories that 'animal' got pushed off the end of
the list. [llama] doesn't get animals, either.

Another query with a similar problem is [java], which doesn't have a category
about travelling to the island.

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lubujackson
Reminds me a lot of what Clusty was trying to do, if anyone remembers that
site.

Not sure I'm sold on the design, it's a bit flashy/sluggish and there's
definitely some bugs that need polishing - for instance, if you use the
scrollbar on the right stuff will get pushed up or down off the screen a bit
requiring you to scroll to reposition everything after you click one of the
tabs. Also there's a boxy feel which de-prioritizes the actual search results,
which isn't helped by the "more/less" arrows that float over the text whenever
the mouse is nearby.

I like the idea of Blekko, but this feels like a step trying to be more
accessible while making the product less robust.

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glomph
It is pretty slow. Even ddg which I find slow at times will display instant
info faster than this. Compared to this is painfully very sluggish.

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dreadsword
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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jmillikin
Here's what I saw when I clicked the link: <http://i.imgur.com/69nIXh9.png>

My first thought was "minimalism is one thing, but this is taking it a bit
far". Then I realized they had actually designed a search engine UI (which is
fundamentally a text box and a button) that requires Javascript.

~~~
greglindahl
People insist on having autocomplete in the text box, and that requires
javascript. The results display engine is html5 and is shared with our tablet
and phone apps.

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pdx
I'm not a designer, but I know what I like.

I like my web pages to center on my wide monitor. When I see pages that don't
do that, I assume an amateur did the page. However, obviously Blekko is not
designed by amateurs. I wonder why they chose to have the page hug the left
edge of my monitor.

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DrinkWater
good looking is relative, so what did it look like earlier?

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peter_l_downs
Sarcasm?

