This is a great announcement, and hopefully good news for both companies. However, I want to point out that this post is a classic example of what annoys me about so many startups' blogs:
1. What is blekko? I've never heard of it, and there's not a clear link to the homepage in the post, only to the results pages, which still doesn't tell me a lot...
2. What is skrentablog? What does that mean? Who is skrenta? Why am I not on blekko's blog?
3. What the hell are "auto-fired slashtag categories"?
Now, I can click around and figure all this out, but I doubt many people will. I'm sure I'm guilty of doing this too, but it might be worth it to take a beat when writing our blog posts and remember that most users who hit your page have no idea who you are, what you do, and they probably don't really care much.
Really good feedback - thank you. You would think I would actually link to blekko.com in my post about our new partnership. The post could definitely have used some more expository material about who we are and what we're doing. That stuff gets added by default to the press release, but I assume skrenta.com has a pretty niche audience and that anyone on my blog already knows who I am and what we're doing....bad assumption obviously and I'll take that into account for future posts.
Hope I wasn't too harsh; I make this mistake myself. You're probably right about your blog audience knowing what you're talking about, but then stuff gets posted here or linked to from DDG and those people may not have any idea.
I do wonder about this when writing posts. On the one hand, your audience generally knows this stuff (in this case Skrenta is blekko's CEO). On the other hand, an announcement post is likely to venture beyond your audience, so it is a balance.
I tried to make this more clear in my post on the same subject, http://ye.gg/blekko -- I wonder how good a job you think I did?
I think your first paragraph is right on, even just a few words of context is very helpful. On the other hand, I do look at both DDG and blekko and wonder why neither of your companies have a blog of their own. Just makes things more confusing and feels slightly...hobbyish? That's maybe not the right way to put it, but maybe you get the idea.
We had the same debate at blekko. We nearly set up a blog.blekko.com, but corporate blogs can get so boring and impersonal. Writing on skrenta.com as the ceo of blekko helps me keep the tone more direct and avoid simply pushing the businesswire release out. In some of my recent posts I've tried to tell stories about projects we did around the launch.
Sure, you can do that on a corporate blog too. But something about them, maybe the multiple authorship, or the fact that it is a company blogging and not an individual...I don't know, I don't tend to read a lot of corp blogs.
I know what you mean, but there are definitely examples of this done well. Though I don't always agree with their message, 37signals does this nicely. It's always clear to me who is writing and each person seems to have a unique voice.
DDG did have a blog, but I decided at the start of the year to consolidate them into my personal blog. There were a number of things that led to that decision but paramount among them was that I think post frequency is key and I didn't have enough time (or ideas) to do both well.
So I picked the personal one. This also fits better for DuckDuckGo since I am a solo founder. But it is still lacking in certain ways, as you are pointing out. To that end, there is a company Faebook/Twitter feed as well as a monthly newsletter. Eventually there could be a blog again.
A long time ago I switched to DDG, and then switched back to Google. Then about 2-3 months ago, I tried DDG again (mostly because of how responsive Gabriel has been to the community, and because of all the privacy improvements to DDG) and it is now my main search engine.
I can still easily search in Google by appending "!g" to my DDG search, or by using "g" in my Chrome URL bar, but most of the time I don't have to because DDG does a good job.
I'm happy about this partnership as long as it actually does improve results and reduce spam. If it achieves that, then long live Blekko!
Update: The only question I have for Gabriel is: Are you running Blekko code on your servers, or are you pinging them every time there's a search? How do you keep it from slowing down DDG?
I don't think start-ups compete against each other. there's 1 800lb gorilla in the room and it ain't blekko or ddg. Partnering to make both of their services better makes alot of sense.
That's good news. Recently I've been unhappy with the amount of spam in Google search results, so I switched to DDG and it's been great so far. I've started to recommend it to others. It's also surprisingly good with finding German websites. Even shows the zero-click boxes for many German things. Better design would be great though.
I don't think you are using the horizontal space well enough. Unless it's reserved for future adverts I'd like to see results in a table with colour coding of the table (i.e. all entity/special results in one column, "classic" style results in another).
Thx, yeah--that space is for some anticipated contextual information, though I am currently pretty open to different ideas. Note you can also move to a wider format (or super wide) in the settings.
Well for one, fonts. Make it look better, I don't know how, I'm no designer, but it looks like it's been done by a programmer. It's ok, but it can be gorgeous! Also perhaps underline the search results. It should be clearer what is clickable and what not.
Also the background going green on hover isn't looking good I think.
You can change all that stuff in the settings; if you come up with a set you think looks better, I'd love to investigate.
As for font, what browser/OS are you on? It is using Segoe UI as the main font, but sadly this isn't installed on all computers. The backup is Arial, which I agree could be better.
I quickly did this with Stylebot for Chromium: http://min.us/iErKG.png :) I'm sure other readers of this thread can come up with something much nicer. Perhaps you should offer a challenge for who can make the best one.
But I already prefer this css to the original. I think I'll keep it.
Search results for terms in spanish are often not good. I assume this is the case for many non-english languages, if not for all. I often have to search for things in spanish, and Google gives em vastly superior results.
For almost everything else, I use DDG.
IMO, if you're trying to make inroads into search market share against a juggernaut like Google then underdogs banding together makes a lot of sense. It's the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" model. In a way, Yahoo went this route with Microsoft's Bing search engine, except they're letting Bing lead the charge completely. If either Blekko or DDG began to grow too big for the partnership they could always pull back. Actually, that's what Google did, since they used to supply some search results for Yahoo.
While it is true I'm still the only one full time, I would be remiss to not highlight that there are many people who are helping out. We have a great community at http://duck.co/ as well as some great official and third party tools largely not written by me: http://duckduckgo.com/tools.html
Also, I've started to work with a great designer on further improving the search UX.
The Amazon link doesn't work for me: "AccessDeniedRequest has expiredBC7549CE3F43E0C72010-11-23T19:56:11ZGABs1ncscRVMcXQTAq97xGGW59tDNmofovrwOmNtzVRQXq5iaL1xQYsyYN7/AD8d2010-11-23T20:26:11Z"
Can someone explain to me how duckduckgo works? I didn't find much about it from a couple of searches.
It seems it just scrapes other search engines, is that true? If so, won't ddg just be blocked by those major search engines if it ever picks up any useful traffic?
They do a combination of their own indexing and using the API of sites like Bing (not sure if I got the second part exactly right, the point is the Bing results are there with MS's blessing).
More discussion of ddg's internals are on the Reddit AMA[1] and the founder's blog[2]
This is a great announcement, and hopefully good news for both companies. However, I want to point out that this post is a classic example of what annoys me about so many startups' blogs:
1. What is blekko? I've never heard of it, and there's not a clear link to the homepage in the post, only to the results pages, which still doesn't tell me a lot...
2. What is skrentablog? What does that mean? Who is skrenta? Why am I not on blekko's blog?
3. What the hell are "auto-fired slashtag categories"?
Now, I can click around and figure all this out, but I doubt many people will. I'm sure I'm guilty of doing this too, but it might be worth it to take a beat when writing our blog posts and remember that most users who hit your page have no idea who you are, what you do, and they probably don't really care much.