
Blekko partners with DuckDuckGo - twampss
http://www.skrenta.com/2010/11/blekko_partners_with_duckduckg.html
======
ryanwaggoner
_Warning: This is a little off-topic._

This is a great announcement, and hopefully good news for both companies.
However, I want to point out that this post is a classic example of what
annoys me about so many startups' blogs:

1\. What is blekko? I've never heard of it, and there's not a clear link to
the homepage in the post, only to the results pages, which still doesn't tell
me a lot...

2\. What is skrentablog? What does that mean? Who is skrenta? Why am I not on
blekko's blog?

3\. What the hell are "auto-fired slashtag categories"?

Now, I can click around and figure all this out, but I doubt many people will.
I'm sure I'm guilty of doing this too, but it might be worth it to take a beat
when writing our blog posts and remember that most users who hit your page
have no idea who you are, what you do, and they probably don't really care
much.

~~~
jsrfded
Really good feedback - thank you. You would think I would actually link to
blekko.com in my post about our new partnership. The post could definitely
have used some more expository material about who we are and what we're doing.
That stuff gets added by default to the press release, but I assume
skrenta.com has a pretty niche audience and that anyone on my blog already
knows who I am and what we're doing....bad assumption obviously and I'll take
that into account for future posts.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Hope I wasn't too harsh; I make this mistake myself. You're probably right
about your blog audience knowing what you're talking about, but then stuff
gets posted here or linked to from DDG and those people may not have any idea.

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MikeCapone
A long time ago I switched to DDG, and then switched back to Google. Then
about 2-3 months ago, I tried DDG again (mostly because of how responsive
Gabriel has been to the community, and because of all the privacy improvements
to DDG) and it is now my main search engine.

I can still easily search in Google by appending "!g" to my DDG search, or by
using "g" in my Chrome URL bar, but most of the time I don't have to because
DDG does a good job.

I'm happy about this partnership as long as it actually does improve results
and reduce spam. If it achieves that, then long live Blekko!

Update: The only question I have for Gabriel is: Are you running Blekko code
on your servers, or are you pinging them every time there's a search? How do
you keep it from slowing down DDG?

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McKittrick
I don't think start-ups compete against each other. there's 1 800lb gorilla in
the room and it ain't blekko or ddg. Partnering to make both of their services
better makes alot of sense.

~~~
wyclif
I view this as a win for everybody, it will avoid a lot of duplication of
effort and fragmentation.

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scrrr
That's good news. Recently I've been unhappy with the amount of spam in Google
search results, so I switched to DDG and it's been great so far. I've started
to recommend it to others. It's also surprisingly good with finding German
websites. Even shows the zero-click boxes for many German things. Better
design would be great though.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Would love to know if you have any particular design ideas or areas where
you'd like to see improvement.

~~~
drats
I don't think you are using the horizontal space well enough. Unless it's
reserved for future adverts I'd like to see results in a table with colour
coding of the table (i.e. all entity/special results in one column, "classic"
style results in another).

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thx, yeah--that space is for some anticipated contextual information, though I
am currently pretty open to different ideas. Note you can also move to a wider
format (or super wide) in the settings.

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paraschopra
Just curious, from long term perspective how does such partnerships help.
Aren't Blekko and DuckDuckGo direct competitors?

~~~
jeromec
IMO, if you're trying to make inroads into search market share against a
juggernaut like Google then underdogs banding together makes a lot of sense.
It's the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" model. In a way, Yahoo went this
route with Microsoft's Bing search engine, except they're letting Bing lead
the charge completely. If either Blekko or DDG began to grow too big for the
partnership they could always pull back. Actually, that's what Google did,
since they used to supply some search results for Yahoo.

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AndrewWarner
"Gabriel and the team at DuckDuckGo"

Gabriel has a team now?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Don't forget Eli: <http://eliweinberg.com/father-sonin>

While it is true I'm still the only one full time, I would be remiss to not
highlight that there are many people who are helping out. We have a great
community at <http://duck.co/> as well as some great official and third party
tools largely not written by me: <http://duckduckgo.com/tools.html>

Also, I've started to work with a great designer on further improving the
search UX.

~~~
MikeCapone
The Amazon link doesn't work for me: "AccessDeniedRequest has
expiredBC7549CE3F43E0C72010-11-23T19:56:11ZGABs1ncscRVMcXQTAq97xGGW59tDNmofovrwOmNtzVRQXq5iaL1xQYsyYN7/AD8d2010-11-23T20:26:11Z"

~~~
epi0Bauqu
OK, fixed it. I wanted to link the full screen version, but I guess posterous
puts some kind of access restriction on them.

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Mithrandir
[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/duckduckgoblekko...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/duckduckgoblekko-
search-partnership.html)

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PostOnce
Can someone explain to me how duckduckgo works? I didn't find much about it
from a couple of searches.

It seems it just scrapes other search engines, is that true? If so, won't ddg
just be blocked by those major search engines if it ever picks up any useful
traffic?

Not trying to be inflammatory, just curious.

~~~
natep
They do a combination of their own indexing and using the API of sites like
Bing (not sure if I got the second part exactly right, the point is the Bing
results are there with MS's blessing).

More discussion of ddg's internals are on the Reddit AMA[1] and the founder's
blog[2]

[1][http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bbqw7/i_am_the_founder...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bbqw7/i_am_the_founder_of_a_search_engine_duck_duck_go/)
[2] <http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/>

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paul9290
Congrats to Gabriel!

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u48998
I want DDG to show me movie times like the way Google does "movies zip code".
Otherwise, I'm all set.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Duly noted!

~~~
ladon86
Also (and easier): Movie running times and metadata.

Check out this query:
[http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=inside+man+running+time](http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=inside+man+running+time)

It's just taken from this page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Man>

You could go one better by handling: "inside man release date" "inside man
gross revenue" "inside man starring"

