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IBM Watson Acquires Technology from Blekko
- wmf 12y agoWelcome ChuckMcM!
- dang 12y agoUrl changed from http://blekko.com/ http://blekko.com/, which redirects (after a while) to this. Should the title just say "IBM Acquires Blekko"? The article seems to stop short of saying so.
- mortehu 12y agoHere's what it used to look like, for those who had never heard of this product: https://i.imgur.com/uIHcEN4.png https://i.imgur.com/uIHcEN4.png
- Animats 12y agoNow that's a surprise. I didn't think Blekko was doing much more than reselling Yandex and adding some social features. Yandex has an $30M equity stake in Blekko - did IBM buy that out?
- greenstork 12y agoI was in touch with Blekko about a year ago regarding using their api to access their index for search results for my own meta-search engine. They might have used Yandex to augment their search results, but Blekko definitely had its own index as well.
- thomasfoster96 12y agoBlekko had a sizeable index of their own. Most successful meta-search engines (like DuckDuckGo) keep their own index because there's not a lot they can get from a Yandex api call.
- greenstork 12y agoMy understanding is actually the opposite. While DuckDuckGo does have a small index of their own, they mainly rely on api calls to Yandex and Yahoo BOSS!
- thomasfoster96 12y agoThey do rely upon the API calls, but their spam elimination requires full web pages, not just what you get from an API call.
- fragglesmock 12y ago/ tags oooooo aaaahhhhhhh , duh
- thomasfoster96 12y agoWow - I'm a little surprised that blekko would be acquired by IBM, but I suppose IBM must see Watson as a huge business now. I think blekko was starting to struggle to stay competitive in consumer search (their backend technology was always pretty good, it's just they struggled to show those results well).
- nullc 12y agoOh Crap. IBM's AI is now buying companies?!?!
- wmf 12y agoYou Bitcoin people keep going on about DACs. Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational M&A machine.
- nullc 12y agoDon't bin me in there, much of that stuff is somewhere between hopelessly naive and outright nonsense. :)
- sk5t 12y agoIt would be kind of a stretch to label Watson as AI, at least currently.
- nkozyra 12y agoSupervised learning still falls under the AI umbrella.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoThere was a funny comment that a lot of IBM's meetings are held on conference calls because they are so large and the organization so dispersed. How hard would it be that someone on that call never seemed to be in any office? ... :-)
- jacquesm 12y agoWe need more alternatives to google, not less. On the one hand, great for blekko to have an exit of sorts, on the other a huge loss for the web. Now it's more or less down to duckduckgo and the likes of gigablast.com (which is now open source).
- thesausageking 12y agoPoor Bing. Hundreds of millions spent on advertising and still less mindshare on Hackernews than Gigablast.
- freehunter 12y agoWhich is odd, because this is the first time I've heard of Gigablast. If that isn't a name straight out of the 90's...
- jacquesm 12y agoGigablast is a testimony to how productive one driven programmer can be. Matt did an amazing job of building and running it.
- miket 12y agoGigablast is alive and well at Diffbot! (founder here) https://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/diffbot-brings-big-time-search-poobah-aboard-to-help-it-scale/ https://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/diffbot-brings-big-time-search...
- jacquesm 12y ago
- dataker 12y agoI don't think IBM is gonna convince many developers to build applications on top of Watson, as open-source has never been in the top of their list. My gut tells me IBM just needs some independent developers to develop some apps and then be acquired( as in that point they'd have no choice). I may be wrong, but I'd rather not take that chance as I work on my projects.
- mark_l_watson 12y agoI remember having an email conversation a long time ago with someone who wrote their own search engine in C++. I think that system was Blekko. Congratulations to Blecko for a (hopefully) nice exit. IBM Watson absorbed AlchemyAPI a few weeks ago. I helped a friend's company integrate IBM Watson into their product, and I have mixed feeling about IBM Watson: plenty of potential, but some rough edges.
- fennecfoxen 12y agoC++? No way, Blekko's done in Perl. See the YAPC slides: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/blekko-yapc-na-2013-2.pdf http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/blekko-yapc-na-2013-2.pdf
- greglindahl 12y agoWe have a lot of C/C++ in the guts of our software, it's a lot more than just the million lines of Perl!
- jmcdowell 12y agoAny reason for the use of Perl both in this and in DDG? I'm a recent Comp Sci graduate and haven't seen a lot jobs for Perl or use cases over say Python/Ruby which seem to more popular.
- TorKlingberg 12y agoI guess the people who made them were already comfortable with Perl. Perl is also very good at text processing.
- gourneau 12y agoBlekko was the only search engine I knew of that provided a no BS unlimited search api. You just had to add '/json' to any request, and you had it their results in json.
- castell 12y agoIBM needs an up-to-date web-scale ontology (Blekko has it) for Watson, it used Freebase (et al) which is closing down on March 31, 2015 (largest open collaborative knowledge base): http://www.freebase.com http://www.freebase.com , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase Freebase was acquired by Google in 2010 and powers their internal Google Knowledge Graph. Microsoft bought Powerset (company) in 2008. Freebase has 2,751,614,700 facts, Wikidata has 13,788,746 facts. Wikidata may import some data of Freebase, but due its stricter guidelines (notability guideline...) many facts of minor will be lost/never migrated. A Freebase dump won't age well, in a lot of cases up-to-date facts from the real world are required. Maybe some community project can rescue the Freebase community project before it is too late? @downvotes: ?
- nchuhoai 12y agoI totally agree, I believe many people vastly underestimate the usefulness of Freebase as a open source ontology. Starting tomorrow, there simply is no real alternative to Freebase and so many great applications are not possible any more :(
- TorKlingberg 12y agoWhat do you mean with "ontology"?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- chiph 12y agoCongrats to Greg and the team.
- johnward 12y agoInteresting. IBM also acquired a startup I worked for (Vivisimo) because of the search technology. We never really focused on web crawling though. We dealt mostly with enterprise systems. Now we're a part of Watson too. Also the Alchemy API seems like it kind of touches parts of what we do which is another recent IBM acquisition.
- davidmoore 12y agoWith Blekko gone there is a very limited number of alternative search engines if you don't want to use Google. Have a look though at Mojeek, a UK privately owned crawler based search engine producing its own results and without any tracing. It is certainly one to watch for the future
- solveforall 12y agoSo much for a graceful shutdown. Search capabilities gone immediately. If you created a slashtag, it's gone forever.
- fragglesmock 12y agoFreebase is a database of things Blekko is a company that classifies things Watson interprets the relationships between classifications . This stuff is way beyond a search engine . People talking about needing to building a better search engine better get to work because I think that space is almost abandoned . A recommendation , an opinion , and a result are a hell of a lot different .