The thing I love most about Blekko is its /date slashtag. But on the other side, it's one of the only clear advantages it has over other search engines; its general slashtags include too few sites. There are some rare occasions where its scarce list of sites comes in handy - such as when you need a rough timeline with /date, and where a single story is parroted, such as Reuters, AP, US Weekly, and People Magazine.
DDG is generally a nice alternative to Google, and its bang commands are invaluable, but it falls short when it comes to delivering relevant hits to my queries.
DDG is my default search engine in browsers, but most of my general queries begin with "!g".
None of the three are mutually exclusive, and I'm glad to have all of them. You shouldn't dismiss any of them nor use them exclusively.
The completeness of our slashtags depends on the slashtag. Do you think /health has too few sites? Among the technical slashtags, /perl and /python are pretty complete, and the rest of the them are currently getting some love from the Stack Overflow community. It takes time for slashtags to mature, similar to how Wikipedia was less useful on launch day verses now.
By the way, there's a /google and /bing on blekko.
I like Blekko. The question shareholders should ask Steve Ballmer is why this small team is out innovating the Bing guys with a tiny, tiny fraction of the money they've spent. Just aiming to recreate Google's search isn't going to win the race.
I like what they're trying to do, but I just don't see them doing a good job of it. We changed our domain name in August of last year, but Blekko is still surfacing our old name.
When you search for "credit card processing" we aren't in the top 100 on Blekko (though we're 2nd page on goog) but there are several sites that have NOTHING to do with credit card processing that are near the top of the list...
I think their crawling just takes a LOT of time/resources and I don't see them getting there anytime soon. Another issue is that their engine requires tags to use effectively and the layman won't learn the tags.
DDG is generally a nice alternative to Google, and its bang commands are invaluable, but it falls short when it comes to delivering relevant hits to my queries.
DDG is my default search engine in browsers, but most of my general queries begin with "!g".
None of the three are mutually exclusive, and I'm glad to have all of them. You shouldn't dismiss any of them nor use them exclusively.