Blekko the New Search Engine - public beta launch!

[tedster]

Blekko search has been in invitation-only beta for months and three years overall in the making. Today the general public gets their first look.

The most significant upgrade to Blekko’s search engine is the addition of slashtags that auto-fire for queries that fall into one seven categories: health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels. Every time a Blekko user’s query is determined to be in one of these categories, Blekko will automatically append the associated slashtag to the query and limit results to just the subset of URLs that fall under that slashtag.

[mashable.com...]

[blekko.com...]

[CenSin]

Still close for my region.

[MWpro]

I find the choice of the seven categories to be strange.

[martinibuster]

Check out the SEO data they provide. There's also a toolbar so you can explore the data they have on the site you're on.

[SevenCubed]

I went and had a look at it, interesting. Then I went and dug up their crawler info and IP ranges to see if I had them blocked -- yep I did, but now allowing them because we sure need some healthy alternatives these days.

If you don't see your site in their results check your robots.txt and/or firewall IPTables for:

ScoutJet is Blekko's crawler and it crawls from the following IP ranges:
64.13.159.*, 38.99.96.*, 38.99.97.*, 38.99.98.*, 38.99.99.* - those numbers may look familiar to those who block an extensive range of IP's from PSI Net

[SevenCubed]

Oh and one more thing. I tried to find a way to ping their crawler but didn't find anything. If someone knows I would appreciate it if you could pass along the info. Otherwise I guess I'll just have to wait until they eventually return. Go figure -- I finally got tired of them exactly one month ago and banned them.

[karter2]

Neat looking interface,

they appear to be sharing Yahoo something ,,,,

site:mydomainname.com

yields a small result then something about Yahoo results below

[bouncybunny]

Hmmm. A few of their indexed URLs on my site are garbled.

The duplicate content section is worrying. Not sure how accurate it is yet though... they list hundreds of site which they say duplicate content on my site, but I've yet to find any.

[bill]

This is a very interesting service they're running. I'm not as thrilled with their SERPs as much as I am enjoying the extra information they are providing. I like where they're heading with this one.

The duplicate content section is worrying.

Yeah. I'd like to know more about where they're getting this data and how to access the duplicated material they're reporting.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

A+ for extra's like the SEO link, though it only helps webmasters. Hostrank looks interesting.

B for main page layout, I find the color gray for links a bit hard to look at.

C for missing features, not having an image search is a deal killer for many people and what's up with the name Blekko?

Overall I like it, and would/will use it. I'm off to examine hostrank now.

[J_RaD]

always nice to have a new search engine.

i'd rate it a D right now but hey its new.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

You need to log in to create a slashtag

That's when I left and I suspect that many others will follow at that stage. I appreciate that log in will be necessary to use slashtags but will the general public understand this?

[chewy]

If their objective is to attract SEO people's attention, they sure have got mine.

Where will this go, anyone knows.

Shall we "blekko" ?

...and for more: [searchengineland.com...]

nice job Vanessa -

......and for an indication of who is behind this (including some x plexers)

[crunchbase.com...]

[Pontus_swe]

C for missing features, not having an image search is a deal killer for many people and what's up with the name Blekko?

Not sure what the name means but it sounds very good in northern Scandinavia at least. But maybe not the best name in the international market?

[topr8]

not happy that they ignore
robots noarchive

[walkman]

i'd rate it a D right now but hey its new.

:) Probably not gonna get any better, at least comparatively if they are now a D. IMO, they either have a great recipe or they don't. [webmasterworld.com...]

[Lovejoy]

I like it, all my sites are on the first page ;~))))

[driller41]

The results are pby not as good as googles, but that is not the point, to me it is nice to see straight results rather all the crap google forces me to take, youtube listing when i did not ask for them, maps when i dont want them, just a simple set of 10 or in this case 20 results.

I feel like I have some power back over what I request :)

[caribguy]

It's happily displaying my "403 - Forbidden" pages in its cache. The same ones that are also disallowed in robots.txt

Wishing them lots of luck, they will need it.

[supafresh]

to see images use the /images

here is an example using blue widgets.

[blekko.com...]

[MatthewHSE]

Seems okay, though the concept of the slash tags seems a bit confusing and unnecessary to me. However, the name certainly isn't doing them any favors; in fact, the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread was - frankly - the sound of somebody losing their lunch.

[docbird]

Quick look and I like it; but indeed don't like the name - while Google's name superb. Chance to mark items as "spam" may be interesting; are they set for people to try trashing competitors?

[ken_b]

I dunno, the name seems kinda close to blech.

[np2003]

Wow, pretty impressive so far.

It's fast and results seem quite relevant.

I like how you can just type for example

widget /blog

which will only search blogs

[atom42]

I like it.

I like their video, but can't help but think they could have made a cartoon explain it rather than the founder guy.

Nice inclusion of SEO data - but not sure the general public will benefit from that so much. Still - I might be proven wrong - it might be that they love having some insight into how sites are ranked in a way that Google doesn't offer.

I like the sense of control that they give, rather than trying to pre-empt what they think you want, they leave you in control - but just with more tools with which to exercise it.

"The site is dead to you". Nice.

[rollinj]

Well... I have a site that has been indexed in all of the big three for the last 4 months, with many thousands of pages now referencing it.

blekko does not even have a mention of the site's name, they pull up yahoo results to supplement, where for example google now has 20,000+ references to the site's name.

Data is obviously 4+ months old. Blech.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Unless I am missing something the SEO function is only a tease. For one of my websites it reports . . .

Domains that duplicate content from this site: 155

It then lists 155 websites that duplicate my content but it does not say what content is duplicated or where it is located on the other site? Reading the help file it should show the duplicate content highlighted but I am not seeing it.

[Rosalind]

not happy that they ignore
robots noarchive

First thing I noticed. If they want to be embraced by webmasters, that's exactly the wrong way to go about it. The SEO details are just fluff, they have to get the basics right first.

[Dijkgraaf]

Also for my domain
"Crawled: 12d ago "
"robots.txt (last fetched: 139d ago)"
I hope that's not actually true.

What UA's/IP's are they using to Crawl with?
As I can't see them in my web logs.

For the duplicated contents, try clicking on the URL link (it defaults to the Domain one), and then go to duplicated contents tab, or use the slashtag /duptext

Under domains it lists all sorts of other domains, but what it means there is that there is data duplicated in the whois information I think.

[Edit: Possible explanation duplicated data under domains]

[SevenCubed]

ScoutJet is Blekko's crawler and it crawls from the following IP ranges:
64.13.159.*, 38.99.96.*, 38.99.97.*, 38.99.98.*, 38.99.99.*