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Blekko is alive

blekko.com

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Re: Blekko is alive

#21

Post by jsrfded »

sp4rki wrote: post #14

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 i…

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.

Re: Blekko is alive

#22

Post by jsrfded »

kqueue wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: Blekko is alive

#23

Post by wumpus »

andrewcooke wrote: post #20

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.

Re: Blekko is alive

#24

Post by 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?

Re: Blekko is alive

#25

Post by sp4rki »

jsrfded wrote: post #21
sp4rki wrote: post #14

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 i…

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!

Re: Blekko is alive

#26

Post by sp4rki »

jsrfded wrote: post #5
shaunxcode wrote: post #2

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.

Re: Blekko is alive

#27

Post by duck »

wumpus wrote: post #23
andrewcooke wrote: post #20

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.

Re: Blekko is alive

#28

Post by jsrfded »

fookyong wrote: post #24

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 resu…

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.

Re: Blekko is alive

#29

Post by _delirium »

jsrfded wrote: post #28
fookyong wrote: post #24

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 resu…

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, [ind…

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!

Re: Blekko is alive

#30

Post by 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.

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