[LINK] blekko search engine and "content farms"

[rene]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2011 14:29:33 +1100, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> At 11:52 PM 28/01/2011, Robin Whittle wrote:
>> Thanks Irene for pointing out the new search engine
>> http://blekko.com, which according to:
>>
>
> Interesting response from Firefox/Mozilla:
> [quote]
> Warning: due to Mozilla's security features, a link was blocked. To
> open a local link, right click, copy link location, then paste to
> location bar and go. The error message was: Security Error: Content
> at http://blekko.com/ may not load or link to
> chrome:blekkotoolbar/content/images/tag.png. [/quote]
>
> So what does that mean?

I suspect it depends on what exactly you clicked on before the error 
message. If you were attempting to e.g. install the blekko toolbar, then 
the error message seems likely to have more to do with Firefox/Mozilla than 
Blekko. In any case, the problem may have something to do with what's said 
in e.g. these search result pages:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=firefox+content+may+not+load
&btnG=Google+Search

> I'm also not thrilled with the facebook logo on it. What's that
> about? "Friends make search better"

I don't see an FB logo with that text, but I guess it's connected with the 
fact that one can log in to blekko using one's facebook login, according 
to:
http://blekko.com/ws/+/help ; "account" tab. 
(Why anyone would do that is more or less - but not really - a mystery to 
this privacy/security concerned person!)

> I've been using http://duckduckgo.com quite successfully after a
> suggestion from Brenda.

At the moment I don't have an opinion on whether duckgo or blekko may be 
better in terms of normal search results, my interest in blekko has been 
more about its SEO tools. 

That said, however, I'd remark that I've never seen a duckduckgo crawler on 
my web site (i.e. in my site logs), but I have seen Blekko's ScoutJet 
crawler. That tends to suggest to me that duckgo may place more reliance on 
'rebranding' search results provided to them by Bing/ex Yahoo, whereas 
blekko might, just might, have more funding and ability to crawl the web 
more broadly itself and hopefully/eventually use its own search results 
more often. Since Bing/MSN bought Yahoo SE:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/07/yahoo-gives-up/
I'd *really* like to see some other search engine that crawls the web 
itself, rather than re-using search content results provided by Google or 
Bing. AFAIK, at present the only other one that claims to, apart from 
perhaps blekko, is Gigablast, but its crawler seems never to have widely 
crawled the Web.

Irene