

Blekko is alive - epi0Bauqu
http://blekko.com/?

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chaosmachine
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>

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

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duncanj
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.

~~~
nhebb
_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.

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kentbrew
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."

~~~
follower
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? :)

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edanm
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.

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sp4rki
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.

~~~
jsrfded
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.

~~~
sp4rki
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!

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rgrove
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.

~~~
edanm
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.

~~~
rgrove
Yes, I find this annoying as well.

------
Dramatize
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.

------
kqueue
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.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
News is news. Don't worry, it will be here tomorrow too.

~~~
chime
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?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Nope, not involved at all.

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fookyong
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_?

~~~
jsrfded
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.

~~~
_delirium
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!

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andrewcooke
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?]

~~~
wumpus
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.

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

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citricsquid
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.

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ZeroMinx
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.

~~~
bbgm
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.

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

~~~
jsrfded
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.

~~~
sp4rki
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.

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zbanks
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.

~~~
krishna2
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>

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PHPAdam
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.

~~~
jsrfded
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..

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jawngee
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.

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kwamenum86
Pretty cool. How long before they get acquired by Google?

