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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Having "been there, done that, got the t-shirt" I can tell you that no, there currently is no market for an unbiased search engine. We (Blekko) couldn't even get enough people to give up an email address in exchange for more control over their search experience.

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>We (Blekko) couldn't even get enough people to give up an email address in exchange for more control over their search experience.

The venn diagram of "people who want more control over their search experience" and "people who are sick up to the back teeth with companies who insist on an email address even to take their product for a trial spin" is pretty much a cross section of an egg, and control over search is the yolk.

Thanks for weighing in. Disappointing that Blekko didn't work out better ... but hey, at least you have the t-shirt!

Do you think that Duck Duck Go's (relative) success shows that there are still possibilities here?

I liked DuckDuckGo's approach, they have really benefited from a user first strategy. That said, it has been interesting how the cost of compute and storage going down has led to such a large number of non-pages on the web. I was reading a paper which estimated that there were probably 10 trillion web documents reachable on the web, and fewer than 10 billion of them were "meaningful" (meaning they had accurate and unique information). If their estimates are correct, literally 99.9% of the web is crap pages. That is a huge discrimination problem.

do you have a link? this fits with my hypothesis, and would be interested to read it.

I respect that. The site just has "acquired by IBM watson team" so I don't know. However, it is possible you were too early. Also, it is impertive that the expereince is built inside a browser. Not 100% sure whate happened to blekko (although looks like you guys landed on your feet) however, if anyone is building a search engine (or you yourself are) I will write up a full marketing plan and strategy and product playbook for free, because it is just so goddamn important.

I think the only Blekko team member stupid enough to still be interested in building a search engine is me, building search for the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. And we have a business plan, we're a charity! :-)

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