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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 ans

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?

jsrfded 16y ago
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.
- _delirium 16y ago
  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 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!

jsrfded 16y ago

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.

_delirium 16y ago
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 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!