[LINK] blekko search engine and "content farms"

Jan Whitaker jwhit at melbpc.org.au
Sat Jan 29 19:44:15 AEDT 2011


At 07:24 PM 29/01/2011, rene wrote:
> > 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.

All I did was click the homepage link to open it for the first time. 
Hadn't even asked for a search yet. I don't like toolbars (anymore) 
because I don't trust them. So that wasn't it.

>  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!)

and why would someone login to a search engine anyway? What are the 
benefits/dangers of that?


> > 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.

Yes, I think that's exactly what Duckgo does. It's a proxy search 
congregator similar to Startpage, perhaps?
Just changed some settings and discovered that it requires cookies.

>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.

No opinion. I think we're at a stage in the Internet that there are 
multiple sources on almost anything you'd want to know about. I have 
found most things with duckgo. It doesn't have a map service, though, 
so I use google for that or mapquest. Wait, not true. I used the 
dropdown on the duckgo homepage and saw the map function. It defaults 
to google maps. I wonder if tracking is then via google and has 
defeated the purpose. Oh well.

Jan



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

_ __________________ _



More information about the Link mailing list