Adding another new search engine

[Greg Lindahl]

Hi,

I'm interested in encouraging Debian to add blekko to the list of
search engines in your browser packages, similar to
http://bugs.debian.org/616115

A few items that you might like to know:

* We have our own crawl and index, backed up by 1,500 servers. This
makes us a minnow compared to google and bing, but it distinguishes us
from the many "storefront" seach engines which get almost all of their
results from google and bing.

* We support OpenSearch and ssl. We send people out via ssl whenever
possible, using a combination of HTTPSeverywhere data and data from
our own multi-billion page crawl.

* Our privacy policy is much better than the major search engines, see
https://blekko.com/about/privacy-policy for details. If you look at
the prefs in the upper right at https://blekko.com/, you can see that
we have a SuperPrivacy mode which turns off some of our features in
order to improve your privacy. Setting DNT:1 in your browser means we
turn on our "lesslogging" mode, also a part of SuperPrivacy.

* Our major feature is the ability to create custom vertical search
engines, which we call slashtags, accessed by adding /foo to your
searches. These come in algorithmic form (/date, /blogs), or are
driven by lists of websites representing curation of the web by human
editors, professional and volunteers. Imagine a combination of
dmoz.org and an algorithmic search engine -- our founding team was the
dmoz founding team.

* If you'd like to read some tech news coverage about blekko, please
see https://blekko.com/ws/blekko+/techblogs+/date , which shows off
how you can combine slashtags. Or stick
https://blekko.com/ws/blekko+/techblogs+/date+/rss into your favorite
feed-reader.

* Existing slashtags created by our users and our staff librarians
include a few things which the typical Debian user might find
interesting: /open-source (/oss for short), /linux, /apache, langauge
slashtags such as /python, /ruby, /java, /js, software systems such as
/mysql, /postgresql, web technologies such as /css, community tags
such as /nosql, /hpc, and so forth and so on.

* The StackOverflow community co-edits many of the above slashtags.

* I'm embarrassed to say that we don't yet have a /debian, but I'd be
happy to help someone with more clue about Debian than I to create
one. A few of our 26 engineers have been debian users, but we don't
have any package maintainers on staff. I've only used debian on mips
and arm, only on the command line, so I know little about your gui
browsers beyond what Linux Weekly News writes about.

* You can examine a list of the well-curated slashtags at
https://blekko.com/tag/show#tab3 ... that's about 1/3 of all the useful
slashtags.

* The slashtags that show us off best right now are things like
/health, and other slashtags for categories which have a lot of ad
money and thus spam on G**gle.

* We're already being distributed by PC-BSD; we made them a special
homepage at https://blekko.com/pcbsd, which they are shipping on all
their browsers. As you can see it's easy to create a search box that
adds in a slashtag to all searches; that might be a great way to
create a Debian-oriented search box which is much wider than the
current site-search at search.debian.org.

I hope I haven't bored everyone to death already -- if you have more
questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

-- greg


<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
                       xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>blekko (https)</ShortName>
<Description>blekko encrypted using HTTPS</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<SyndicationRight>limited</SyndicationRight>
<Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">https://blekko.com/favicon.ico</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="https://blekko.com/ws/+{searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" template="https://blekko.com/autocomplete?term={searchTerms}&lang={language?}&
form=opensearch"/>
<Url type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" rel="self" template="https://blekko.com/s/blekko_https.xml" />
<moz:SearchForm>https://blekko.com/</moz:SearchForm>
</OpenSearchDescription>