
IBM Watson Acquires Technology from Blekko - boyter
http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2015/03/better-way-tap-big-data-gusher.html
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castell
IBM needs an up-to-date web-scale ontology (Blekko has it) for Watson, it used
Freebase (et al) which is closing down on March 31, 2015 (largest open
collaborative knowledge base):
[http://www.freebase.com](http://www.freebase.com) ,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase)

Freebase was acquired by Google in 2010 and powers their internal Google
Knowledge Graph. Microsoft bought Powerset (company) in 2008.

Freebase has 2,751,614,700 facts, Wikidata has 13,788,746 facts. Wikidata may
import some data of Freebase, but due its stricter guidelines (notability
guideline...) many facts of minor will be lost/never migrated. A Freebase dump
won't age well, in a lot of cases up-to-date facts from the real world are
required.

Maybe some community project can rescue the Freebase community project before
it is too late?

@downvotes: ?

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TorKlingberg
What do you mean with "ontology"?

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jacquesm
We need more alternatives to google, not less. On the one hand, great for
blekko to have an exit of sorts, on the other a huge loss for the web. Now
it's more or less down to duckduckgo and the likes of gigablast.com (which is
now open source).

~~~
thesausageking
Poor Bing. Hundreds of millions spent on advertising and still less mindshare
on Hackernews than Gigablast.

~~~
miket
Gigablast is alive and well at Diffbot! (founder here)

[https://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/diffbot-brings-big-time-
search...](https://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/diffbot-brings-big-time-search-
poobah-aboard-to-help-it-scale/)

~~~
jacquesm
Neat! Thanks for all the hard work over the years.

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gourneau
Blekko was the only search engine I knew of that provided a no BS unlimited
search api. You just had to add '/json' to any request, and you had it their
results in json.

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mark_l_watson
I remember having an email conversation a long time ago with someone who wrote
their own search engine in C++. I think that system was Blekko.
Congratulations to Blecko for a (hopefully) nice exit.

IBM Watson absorbed AlchemyAPI a few weeks ago.

I helped a friend's company integrate IBM Watson into their product, and I
have mixed feeling about IBM Watson: plenty of potential, but some rough
edges.

~~~
fennecfoxen
C++? No way, Blekko's done in Perl. See the YAPC slides:
[http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/blekko-yapc-
na-2013-2.pdf](http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/blekko-yapc-na-2013-2.pdf)

~~~
jmcdowell
Any reason for the use of Perl both in this and in DDG? I'm a recent Comp Sci
graduate and haven't seen a lot jobs for Perl or use cases over say
Python/Ruby which seem to more popular.

~~~
TorKlingberg
I guess the people who made them were already comfortable with Perl. Perl is
also very good at text processing.

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thomasfoster96
Wow - I'm a little surprised that blekko would be acquired by IBM, but I
suppose IBM must see Watson as a huge business now. I think blekko was
starting to struggle to stay competitive in consumer search (their backend
technology was always pretty good, it's just they struggled to show those
results well).

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fragglesmock
Freebase is a database of things Blekko is a company that classifies things
Watson interprets the relationships between classifications . This stuff is
way beyond a search engine .

People talking about needing to building a better search engine better get to
work because I think that space is almost abandoned .

A recommendation , an opinion , and a result are a hell of a lot different .

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wmf
Welcome ChuckMcM!

~~~
brudgers
Saw the headline and wondered about his landing. Glad to know he's headed to
another interesting project.

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dataker
I don't think IBM is gonna convince many developers to build applications on
top of Watson, as open-source has never been in the top of their list.

My gut tells me IBM just needs some independent developers to develop some
apps and then be acquired( as in that point they'd have no choice).

I may be wrong, but I'd rather not take that chance as I work on my projects.

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johnward
Interesting. IBM also acquired a startup I worked for (Vivisimo) because of
the search technology. We never really focused on web crawling though. We
dealt mostly with enterprise systems. Now we're a part of Watson too. Also the
Alchemy API seems like it kind of touches parts of what we do which is another
recent IBM acquisition.

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davidmoore
With Blekko gone there is a very limited number of alternative search engines
if you don't want to use Google. Have a look though at Mojeek, a UK privately
owned crawler based search engine producing its own results and without any
tracing. It is certainly one to watch for the future

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Animats
Now that's a surprise. I didn't think Blekko was doing much more than
reselling Yandex and adding some social features. Yandex has an $30M equity
stake in Blekko - did IBM buy that out?

~~~
thomasfoster96
Blekko had a sizeable index of their own. Most successful meta-search engines
(like DuckDuckGo) keep their own index because there's not a lot they can get
from a Yandex api call.

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greenstork
My understanding is actually the opposite. While DuckDuckGo does have a small
index of their own, they mainly rely on api calls to Yandex and Yahoo BOSS!

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thomasfoster96
They do rely upon the API calls, but their spam elimination requires full web
pages, not just what you get from an API call.

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solveforall
So much for a graceful shutdown. Search capabilities gone immediately. If you
created a slashtag, it's gone forever.

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chiph
Congrats to Greg and the team.

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dang
Url changed from [http://blekko.com/](http://blekko.com/), which redirects
(after a while) to this.

Should the title just say "IBM Acquires Blekko"? The article seems to stop
short of saying so.

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mortehu
Here's what it used to look like, for those who had never heard of this
product: [https://i.imgur.com/uIHcEN4.png](https://i.imgur.com/uIHcEN4.png)

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wyldfire
So as a result of the acquisition, IBM has disabled the service? Seems odd.
Their only interest was supplementing/enhancing Watson?

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Istof
at least when Google acquires an existing service, it waits a few years before
shutting it down

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nullc
Oh Crap. IBM's AI is now buying companies?!?!

~~~
wmf
You Bitcoin people keep going on about DACs. Now witness the firepower of this
fully armed and operational M&A machine.

~~~
nullc
Don't bin me in there, much of that stuff is somewhere between hopelessly
naive and outright nonsense. :)

