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."
Blekko is alive
31–40 of 41 posts
Re: Blekko is alive
#32My 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.
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.
Re: Blekko is alive
#33How 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.
Re: Blekko is alive
#34Blekko 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."
I have been wanting a search engine that will remove stackoverflow scrapers from my search results for some time.
Re: Blekko is alive
#35Blekko 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."
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? :)
Re: Blekko is alive
#36Very 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.
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
Re: Blekko is alive
#371. 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.
News is news. Don't worry, it will be here tomorrow too.
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?
Re: Blekko is alive
#38I 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.
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.
Re: Blekko is alive
#39Some 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.
Re: Blekko is alive
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
News is news. Don't worry, it will be here tomorrow too.
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?
Nope, not involved at all.