IBM Watson and Blekko

news from 5 months back

[Robert Charlton]

I guess this tells me how often I came to use Blekko. Clearly I haven't been there for the past five months.

http://blekko.com [blekko.com]

blekko

The blekko technology and team have joined IBM Watson!

IBM Watson Group

The "announcement" links to a March 27, 2015 blog post [asmarterplanet.com...] which includes...

My emphasis added...

In our work to enhance the performance of cognitive computing systems, we’re constantly exploring new ways to identify, understand and make use of information from both public and private sources. Toward this end, we are excited about the acquisition of certain technology from Blekko, Inc, which closed this afternoon. This will provide access to additional content that can be infused in Watson-based products and services delivered by IBM and its partners.

There aren't many mentions around the web. I see that Matt McGee did a short write-up on Search Engine Land [searchengineland.com...] which covers the same details I'm posting and some background on Blekko in more detail.

No followup anywhere. It's tempting to speculate whether Watson technology will be competing with Google in years to come.


Fixed typo.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:23 am (utc) on Aug 24, 2015]

[lucy24]

Well, there's a blast from the past. Whatever happened to the blekkobot anyway? I used to see it all the time. (Or used to feed it 403s all the time, at least. I think they must crawl from other people's IPs; I can't remember them ever doing anything to offend.)

[Robert Charlton]

Hi Lucy. Blekko apparently is shut down. Rich Skrenta hasn't posted to his Twitter account since the announcement.

The typo I corrected in my post was to change "There are many mentions around the web" to "There aren't many mentions around the web". It struck me as a sad farewell for another search engine that tried.

I forget who it was who posted on WebmasterWorld many years ago, to the effect that it's much harder to get people to use a search engine than it is to build one. I think there's some of each kind of difficulty. It's obviously incredibly hard to build anything on the scale of Google, or to keep a small engine like Blekko going on the kind of relatively low budget it had.

[topr8]

>>to the effect that it's much harder to get people to use a search engine than it is to build one

i would agree with that .... indeed i think it applies to commerce in general, developing a product - even a really good one is (mostly) the easy part ... getting people to buy it/use it is much harder, especially if the product is a variation of one that is already popular.

i admit i hadn't noticed blekko disappearance either, i obviously hadn't used it since march 27th either! while it's a shame to see it disappear (as a stand alone SE) i can't see any new player entering the game in any meaningful way, the cost of getting people to use it would just be beyond the kind of capital that is available.

i can only see a new heavyweight in search morphing out of or extending from a pinterest/twitter type application - more likely one that hasn't started yet. some kind of crowd sourcing technology could spring up ... although the catch is as things become more mainstream then they sinks to the lowest common denominator too!