The Secrets Behind Blekko's Search Technology

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38 points·McKittrick··7 comments

Blekko is certainly interesting, specially with /seo slash tags. I think there is space for blekko where Google does not return interesting result. After Google instant its becoming place where you should find something in first 1-5 seconds. If not, its lot harder to find on Google. Blekko on the other hand you can run queries with different dimensions running slash tags (eg. you can sort by date with \date if you want liberal perspective you can do \liberal etc). So Blekko to me is becoming more of a search tool. Its certainly a niche, but i think there is space for these niche search engines. Another good example of niche search space is wolfram alpha.

what are your use cases for wolfram alpha?

I'm just surprised that a search engine I've never heard of has 800 servers, each with 64GB of RAM and 8TB across 8 disk.

(OK, I've heard of them, but now I'm interested enough to take a serious look!)

I was thinking the same thing, but they seem to have raised 24M over the last three years[1], so it makes sense.

[1]:http://www.crunchbase.com/company/blekko

Perl is dead. You can't write the newest best alternative to Google in a dead language. Someone needs to tell them immediately. They must be unaware.

Kidding of course. Now where's their contributions to CPAN? http://search.cpan.org/search?query=blekko&mode=all

I want some of that code!

How can I decide which words should be slashtags in a query?

There are a couple of ways to find slashtags:

* The autocomplete info contains suggested slashtags for the search you're typing * Use "find slashtags" to browse or search the list of slashtags

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