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Blekko partners with DuckDuckGo
- paraschopra 16y agoJust curious, from long term perspective how does such partnerships help. Aren't Blekko and DuckDuckGo direct competitors?
- jeromec 16y agoIMO, if you're trying to make inroads into search market share against a juggernaut like Google then underdogs banding together makes a lot of sense. It's the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" model. In a way, Yahoo went this route with Microsoft's Bing search engine, except they're letting Bing lead the charge completely. If either Blekko or DDG began to grow too big for the partnership they could always pull back. Actually, that's what Google did, since they used to supply some search results for Yahoo.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoDuckDuckGo's long term perspective is getting to the best search UX. We use a lot of APIs to do that, and now blekko is one of them.
- idoh 16y agoThey are theoretical competitors but I'm guessing the overlap between their user bases is really small.
- McKittrick 16y agoI don't think start-ups compete against each other. there's 1 800lb gorilla in the room and it ain't blekko or ddg. Partnering to make both of their services better makes alot of sense.
- AndrewWarner 16y ago"Gabriel and the team at DuckDuckGo" Gabriel has a team now?
- there 16y ago(team of servers)
- jimboyoungblood 16y agoHis team: "Me, myself, and I"
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoDon't forget Eli: http://eliweinberg.com/father-sonin http://eliweinberg.com/father-sonin While it is true I'm still the only one full time, I would be remiss to not highlight that there are many people who are helping out. We have a great community at http://duck.co/ http://duck.co/ as well as some great official and third party tools largely not written by me: http://duckduckgo.com/tools.html http://duckduckgo.com/tools.html Also, I've started to work with a great designer on further improving the search UX.
- random42 16y agoAlso, I've started to work with a great designer on further improving the search UX. +1. As a developer, who is also the sole designer in the team, nothing pleases me more, when someone does not try to apply common sense for design/UX.
- MikeCapone 16y agoThe Amazon link doesn't work for me: "AccessDeniedRequest has expiredBC7549CE3F43E0C72010-11-23T19:56:11ZGABs1ncscRVMcXQTAq97xGGW59tDNmofovrwOmNtzVRQXq5iaL1xQYsyYN7/AD8d2010-11-23T20:26:11Z"
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoOK, fixed it. I wanted to link the full screen version, but I guess posterous puts some kind of access restriction on them.
- MikeCapone 16y agoA long time ago I switched to DDG, and then switched back to Google. Then about 2-3 months ago, I tried DDG again (mostly because of how responsive Gabriel has been to the community, and because of all the privacy improvements to DDG) and it is now my main search engine. I can still easily search in Google by appending "!g" to my DDG search, or by using "g" in my Chrome URL bar, but most of the time I don't have to because DDG does a good job. I'm happy about this partnership as long as it actually does improve results and reduce spam. If it achieves that, then long live Blekko! Update: The only question I have for Gabriel is: Are you running Blekko code on your servers, or are you pinging them every time there's a search? How do you keep it from slowing down DDG?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- scrrr 16y agoThat's good news. Recently I've been unhappy with the amount of spam in Google search results, so I switched to DDG and it's been great so far. I've started to recommend it to others. It's also surprisingly good with finding German websites. Even shows the zero-click boxes for many German things. Better design would be great though.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoWould love to know if you have any particular design ideas or areas where you'd like to see improvement.
- scrrr 16y agoWell for one, fonts. Make it look better, I don't know how, I'm no designer, but it looks like it's been done by a programmer. It's ok, but it can be gorgeous! Also perhaps underline the search results. It should be clearer what is clickable and what not. Also the background going green on hover isn't looking good I think.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoYou can change all that stuff in the settings; if you come up with a set you think looks better, I'd love to investigate. As for font, what browser/OS are you on? It is using Segoe UI as the main font, but sadly this isn't installed on all computers. The backup is Arial, which I agree could be better.
- scrrr 16y agoI quickly did this with Stylebot for Chromium: http://min.us/iErKG.png http://min.us/iErKG.png :) I'm sure other readers of this thread can come up with something much nicer. Perhaps you should offer a challenge for who can make the best one. But I already prefer this css to the original. I think I'll keep it.
- 16y ago
- Mithrandir 16y agohttp://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/duckduckgoblekko-search-partnership.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/duckduckgoblekko...
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoWarning: This is a little off-topic. This is a great announcement, and hopefully good news for both companies. However, I want to point out that this post is a classic example of what annoys me about so many startups' blogs: 1. What is blekko? I've never heard of it, and there's not a clear link to the homepage in the post, only to the results pages, which still doesn't tell me a lot... 2. What is skrentablog? What does that mean? Who is skrenta? Why am I not on blekko's blog? 3. What the hell are "auto-fired slashtag categories"? Now, I can click around and figure all this out, but I doubt many people will. I'm sure I'm guilty of doing this too, but it might be worth it to take a beat when writing our blog posts and remember that most users who hit your page have no idea who you are, what you do, and they probably don't really care much.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoI do wonder about this when writing posts. On the one hand, your audience generally knows this stuff (in this case Skrenta is blekko's CEO). On the other hand, an announcement post is likely to venture beyond your audience, so it is a balance. I tried to make this more clear in my post on the same subject, http://ye.gg/blekko http://ye.gg/blekko -- I wonder how good a job you think I did?
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoI think your first paragraph is right on, even just a few words of context is very helpful. On the other hand, I do look at both DDG and blekko and wonder why neither of your companies have a blog of their own. Just makes things more confusing and feels slightly...hobbyish? That's maybe not the right way to put it, but maybe you get the idea.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoDDG did have a blog, but I decided at the start of the year to consolidate them into my personal blog. There were a number of things that led to that decision but paramount among them was that I think post frequency is key and I didn't have enough time (or ideas) to do both well. So I picked the personal one. This also fits better for DuckDuckGo since I am a solo founder. But it is still lacking in certain ways, as you are pointing out. To that end, there is a company Faebook/Twitter feed as well as a monthly newsletter. Eventually there could be a blog again.
- u48998 16y agoI want DDG to show me movie times like the way Google does "movies zip code". Otherwise, I'm all set.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoDuly noted!
- ladon86 16y agoAlso (and easier): Movie running times and metadata. Check out this query: http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=inside+man+running+time http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=inside+man+running+time It's just taken from this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Man You could go one better by handling: "inside man release date" "inside man gross revenue" "inside man starring"
- PostOnce 16y agoCan someone explain to me how duckduckgo works? I didn't find much about it from a couple of searches. It seems it just scrapes other search engines, is that true? If so, won't ddg just be blocked by those major search engines if it ever picks up any useful traffic? Not trying to be inflammatory, just curious.
- natep 16y agoThey do a combination of their own indexing and using the API of sites like Bing (not sure if I got the second part exactly right, the point is the Bing results are there with MS's blessing). More discussion of ddg's internals are on the Reddit AMA[1] and the founder's blog[2] [1]http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bbqw7/i_am_the_founder_of_a_search_engine_duck_duck_go/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bbqw7/i_am_the_founder... [2] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/ http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/
- paul9290 16y agoCongrats to Gabriel!