With Iron Man 3 debuting in the US tonight, here are some fun facts!

The first weekend in May has become a big deal for Marvel movies. Since 2007, this weekend has seen the major release of a Marvel comic book adaptation.

2007 – Spider-Man 3

2008 – Iron Man

2009 – X-Men Origins: Wolverine

2010 – Iron Man 2

2011 – Thor

2012 – Marvel’s The Avengers

And now 2013 – Iron Man 3!

A primary influence on the story of Iron Man 3 comes from Warren Ellis and Adi Granov’s Iron Man story arc “Extremis” from 2005.

Iron Man 3 has already been released internationally, with an opening haul of $195.3 million, besting the previous record holding top grosser, Marvel’s The Avengers ($185.1 million).

The main protagonist of the film, The Mandarin, has been changed from his more fantastical comic book form. The character has been around since Tales of Suspense #50 in 1964. In the comics, he was created as a stereotypical Fu Manchu villain, wielding 10 power rings on his fingers. Seen as a caricature of the yellow scare of the times, to prevent any potentially racist stereotypes, Mandarin has been changed to a more grounded, militaristic terrorist, sans power rings.

One comic book storyline you’ll never see completely adapted to an Iron Man flick; Demon in a Bottle. The arc ran in 1979, which dealt primarily with Tony Stark’s alcoholism. Traces of it have been alluded to in the films, most notably in Iron Man 2 when Tony, while drunk in the Iron Man suit, begins acting out and scaring his party guests.

MoneySupermarket, a financial services company, tallied up how much it would cost to be Iron Man. No surprise, it costs more to be Iron Man than the Dark Knight.

Use izik to find showtimes and reviews!

Watch live on ESPN or NFL Network.

Start Times:

4/25 – 8pm ET (Round 1)

4/26 – 6:30pm ET (Rounds 2-3)

4/27 – Noon ET (Round s 4-7)

The NFL Draft is held at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall.

The Kansas City Chiefs have the first pick this year.

The Baltimore Ravens have the last pick of the first round, as they won the Super Bowl in 2012.

Unlike drafts from the past, this year’s draft is VERY heavy on offensive and defensive lineman. The so-called “skill” positions (like Quarterback, Running Back, and Wide Receiver) are not expected to be the focus of the First Round picks in 2013.

Each team has 10 minutes to make their pick in round one; 7 minutes per selection in round two and 5 minutes in each of the subsequent rounds.

Look out for draft day trades as teams try to move up or down in the draft order. The San Francisco 49ers are most likely to wheel and deal as they have a whopping 13 picks to use in 2013!

The first draft was in 1936 and the idea was conceived in an NFL owners meeting in May of 1935. Bert Bell, the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, proposed a system where teams would pick in reverse order of where they had finished the previous season. This idea is still used the modern drafts.

The first player ever selected in 1936 inaugural draft was Jay Berwanger by the Philadelphia Eagles. However, the Eagles did not believe they could afford to sign him for the salary he desired ($1,000 a game) and traded the rights of Berwanger to the Chicago Bears.

“Mr. Irrelevant” is the last player picked in the draft. The first player awarded as Mr. Irrelevant was Kelvin Kirk, who was pick number 487 of the 1976 draft. The most notable Mr. Irrelevant may be Ryan Succop, who has been a starting NFL kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs since 2009 and was named to the 2009 All-Rookie team.

The term “War Room” is used to describe where the team draft executives convene in a room to decide which players to pick or which draft choices to trade.

Download izik on your iPad or Android tablet, and look up more facts and figures as you follow the NFL Draft!

Hall of Famers who were drafted #1 overall:

Troy Aikman – 1989 (Dallas Cowboys)

Bruce Smith – 1985 (Buffalo Bills)

John Elway – 1983 (Denver Broncos)

Earl Campbell – 1978 (Houston Oilers)

Lee Roy Selmon – 1976 (Tampa Bay Buccaneers)

Terry Bradshaw – 1970 (Pittsburgh Steelers)

OJ Simpson – 1969 (Buffalo Bills)

Ron Yary – 1968 (Minnesota Vikings)

Buck Buchanan – 1963 (Kansas City Chiefs)

Paul Hornung – 1957 (Green Bay Packers)

Chuck Bednarik – 1949 (Philadelphia Eagles)

Charley Trippi – 1945 (Chicago Cardinals)

Bill Dudley – 1942 (Pittsburgh Steelers)

Great players who were drafted LATE:

Tom Brady – 2000 Round 6 (New England Patriots) FUTURE Hall of Famer

Bart Starr – 1956 Round 17 (Green Bay Packers) Hall of Famer

Roger Staubach – 1964 Round 10 (Dallas Cowboys)  Hall of Famer

Deacon Jones – 1961 Round 14 (Los Angeles Rams) Hall of Famer

Steve Largent – 1976 Round 4 (Houston Oilers) Hall of Famer

Mike Webster – 1974 Round 5 (Pittsburgh Steelers) Hall of Famer

Shannon Sharpe – 1990 Round 7 (Denver Broncos) Hall of Famer

Raymond Berry – 1954 Round 20 (Baltimore Colts) Hall of Famer

Richard Dent – 1983 Round 8 (Chicago Bears) Hall of Famer

Terrell Davis – 1995 Round 6 (Denver Broncos)

Marques Colston – 2006 Round 7 (New Orleans Saints)

Dwight Clark – 1979 Round 10 (SF 49ers)

When people first learn about blekko’s slashtags (which power categories on izik), they are often surprised to hear that we have content editors who curate the web. This small, nimble, and all-around awesome team make a huge impact on the quality of results you see on blekko and izik. Sometimes, in the midst of curating slashtags and providing QA for products, they like to shake things up with a little friendly competition.

March Madness: Slashtag Edition

The purpose of the slashtag contest was to significantly increase the number of slashtags, thereby increasing the number of categories on izik. The more categories we have in our arsenal, the more we can capture multiple query intents on izik. By analyzing query data and taking inventory of izik’s categories, the Content team determined that dedicating a chunk of time to churning out fresh slashtags would be a worthwhile endeavor.

The Rules of the Game

There was just one contest rule: complete as many slashtags as possible in the span of a month. There was, however, an element of strategy involved. The winner would be determined by most potential queries covered from the cumulative slashtags they worked on. In light of that, content editors could choose to curate slashtags they were passionate about (like camaro, baking) or go for the heavy-hitters (like military). Of course, they wouldn’t know what the query coverage would be until the slashtags were completed and tests run. So, a Content Editor would sometimes choose those personal interest ones in hopes that they’d strike gold (sorry, 1980s).

The Final Score

Who won? Well, of course we did have an individual contributor who got bragging rights, but in the end we’re all winners (that includes users who will benefit from great results on izik)! Thanks to March Madness, the Content team collectively created a total of 77 new slashtags/categories, that cover over a quarter of a million queries! Thank you Jen, Adrianna, Brian, and David!

If you think my claim that we are all winners is a cop-out, I assure you the entire team feels that way and the spoils of victory were shared with the whole company! Goodies from three of the finest local bakeries were procured to celebrate March Madness: Slashtag Edition.

See the complete list of the 77 new slashtags at the bottom of this post. What categories would you like to see on izik?

Our first steps in accomplishing this are showing more types of Trending content and Recent searches on izik for iPad. (Fret not, the latter will be available for Android soon!) Starting today, you can access these new features.

Trending

As the Web gets bigger and expands our worlds, it’s tricky to balance being connected and at the same time filter for content that matters to us. We took some of the most popular types of trending categories and made them accessible on the homepage. You will now find Trending Searches, Trending on Twitter, and Trending News Stories.

Trending on Twitter

Trending News

Tap the icons above the trending row to move between categories. See what’s buzzing on the Web, blowing up on Twitter, or hot in the news.

Recent Searches

We often do quick searches on our tablets while moving between activities. Thus, we make your search history easy to return to. Just open the left drawer, tap the search term you want, and you will go back to the search results page.

You always have the option to delete your search history, which you can also do from the left drawer, below the Recent list or under Settings.

Recent Searches

And Beyond

We have features in the works to create search experiences that are more authentic to ourselves by tapping into the way people think in stream-of-consciousness. Stay tuned for features that will further integrate Web exploration with your interests!

You can find us:

1. At the trade show, doing our thing at Booth 227, March 10-13. Come by for a demo and free t-shirt! The shirt is a special SXSW edition, so you won’t want to miss out.

2. Cruising around town on bicycles to promote our bike giveaway!

3. At meet-ups, parties, bars, the streets of Austin – you know how SXSW do.

Around here we like to say, “Take search for a joy ride.” With izik’s fresh, visual interface, we want to impart a sense of joy and wonder as you explore the Web. In that spirit, we invite you to connect with us — we don’t want to just demo our tablet app; we want to get some real time feedback to make the product even better for YOU! So between chasing celebs and VIP parties, make sure to find us and say “hi” to your friends at izik.

And if you know where Justin Timberlake is going to be, take me with you.

P.S. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook for bike promo updates and glimpses of SXSW from our perspective.

When you’re at a Super Bowl party, izik will enhance the viewing experience and help drive conversations – it’s perfect for looking up quick stats, getting the lowdown on the Harbaugh family legacy, and it’s fun to explore during the slower parts of the game. izik organizes search results into categories, so in the case with the image below you’ll see that with just one search you get content from News and Images to Jerseys and Sports Betting, and more.

Read about the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens while the game is on. Which quarterback has the stronger stats – Kaepernick or Flacco?

This year’s game has an extra element of intrigue – the family rivalry between the two head coaches Jim and John Harbaugh. But the big question on people’s minds is who are the parents rooting for? Expect lots of reaction shots of Lynn and Rick!

For those who show up more for the party than the game, the trifecta of the event is: food, commercials, and the halftime show. First, we have to get our appies squared away. See a recipe for a mouthwatering dish? Expand and share it so the party host can make it!

To many, the commercials are the biggest draw.

Then again with Beyonce performing, the halftime show may be the biggest draw of all for Super Bowl XLVII!

Download izik and take your Super Bowl viewing experience to the next level!

Search engines have been trying to divide results into meaningful categories — something better than “web, images, or news” — for many years without success. A few experimental search engines showed a list of categories on the left-hand side of the screen, and users rarely clicked on them to see what was inside. Now that the iPad has enabled easy horizontal and vertical swiping and scrolling, the user interface for exploring multiple categories of results is much easier and prettier. izik takes full advantage of that opportunity. But the second problem with categories is the one that izik has really solved: picking good ones.

If you do many different queries on izik, you’ll see that there are thousands of categories. For ambiguous queries, they can often do a good job of showing all sides of the question. A query for [giants] will show both football and baseball-related categories, and a query for [organic baby food] has separate categories for buying, making, and the health issues around organic baby food. In comparison, bing and Google show almost all links and ads for buying baby food, a single link for the health angle, and nothing about making your own.

Here are a few more examples of queries and categories:

ford mustang: muscle-cars, car-parts, ford, news, classic-cars, cars
Tom Cruise: actors, people, gossip
fiscal cliff: money, news, congress
Beyoncé: latest, gossip, music, news, lyrics, tv, movies
asteroids: science, music (a band named “The Asteroids”), video games, latest is about asteroids hitting the earth

Selecting Categories

Some of the categories are straightforward. “Top results” are similar results to the “10 blue links” you’d get on most other search engines, “Images” are images, and “Latest” is the most recent dated results for the query. “News” is results from our human-curated list of news sources, so while it probably isn’t quite as up-to-date or diverse as “Latest”, it may have much higher quality.

What about the other thousand categories? Well, to start with, these categories correspond to the human-curated vertical search engines that we call “slashtags” on the blekko.com search engine. blekko.com automatically applies these slashtags to fight webspam and improve the relevance of results. However, blekko’s search results are still displayed as the usual search engine result — “10 blue links” — and it’s not immediately clear what slashtags are doing for you.

With izik, we decided to show a lot more than 10 results, and show you all of the slashtags which might seem relevant to the query. As you can see from the baby food example, this can really help you explore all aspects of your query.

The two types of analysis that are commonly attempted to categorize search engine results are clustering and semantic search, both of which are hot research topics. Most semantic search algorithms use explicit knowledge about entities and words: “Tiger Woods” is a golfer, and the ‘Giants’ is the name of both a pro baseball and pro football team.

The heart of blekko’s Dynamic Inference Graph (DIG) algorithm doesn’t know anything about words. It uses two data sources: librarian-crafted semantic categories (slashtags), and the enormous, free dataset known as the “World Wide Web.” The web knows that Tiger Woods is a golfer: the words “Tiger Woods” frequently appear on golfing websites. These 2 words also frequently appear on websites that sell golfing equipment. And they don’t appear frequently on websites about sailing, football, or women’s handbags.

How did we choose the categories? This process is driven by our librarians, and has evolved significantly over time. We used to have golfing websites and golf-equipment-selling websites together in a single category, until we realized that it’s very useful to be able to separate answers about sports from information about buying sports equipment. These sorts of insights have really helped us as we’ve expanded the category list from 10s to 100s to thousands of slashtags.

In addition to having names, categories contain lists of human-curated, high-quality websites. This is one thing that the data on the web, or an algorithm, can’t do it without human help. No one has invented an algorithm that detects bogus medical advice, but a human can choose the right standard for a category (in the health case, that the website has all of its information reviewed by doctors), and the evaluate whether websites meet that standard or not.

The web is the other dataset used by DIG. Since we’re a search engine, we already have the text from the web stored in our datacenter. We distill the text and links down to a small semantic database, and use that database to map queries to a large list of categories. This mapping currently takes about 60 milliseconds. We then run the search itself in a similar fashion to how blekko.com does it, finding results for every category in addition to generic results. Finally, we look at the parent/child relationships of the categories, and at duplicate results, in order to end with a reasonable number of categories with different results.

When we look back now, we’ve been hard at work building this technology for 5 years. At the start, we had no idea what we were building. After building out the basic slashtag system, two years ago someone asked a key question: “Hey, why can’t we automatically add the /health slashtag to the query [cure for headaches]?” One year ago we launched “auto-boosted slashtags” on blekko.com, and today we have the Dynamic Inference Graph and izik.

Every refinement we’ve made has led us closer to a categorized tablet search engine that’s fun and easy to use. It’s been a fun ride, and we hope that you find izik to be useful!

We launched izik, our search app for tablets, last Friday and are amazed at the responses we’ve received! Thanks to our users, on day one izik was the #1 free reference app on iTunes and #49 free app overall. Yesterday we were mentioned twice in the New York Times, here and here (also in the B1 story in print). We are delighted that there is such a strong desire to see something fresh and new in search, and that our vision with izik is so well received.

The twitterverse has been especially active in spreading the word about izik. We’ve seen a lot of comments about the beautiful design and interface, the useful categories, and most importantly the high quality results that make izik a truly viable choice for searching on tablets.

In addition to the press listed at the bottom of our last blog post, here are more reviews and honorable mentions that have rolled in:

Search Engine Watch
Cult of Mac
Appolicious
Skrenta Blog (from our very own CEO)
Cosmic VC
New York Times
New York Times Bits Blog

But what better way to learn about izik than to try it out on your own Android tablet or iPad? If you like what you see, please encourage your friends to give it a whirl and help us move the search market forward.

P.S. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for news and updates (teaser: we have a mobile phone app in the works).

We are giddy to announce the launch of izik, our new search app built specifically with the iPad and Android tablets in mind. With izik, every search on your tablet is transformed into a beautiful, glossy page that utilizes rich images, categories, and, of course, gesture controls. Check it: so much content, so many ways to explore.

Tablets are increasingly getting integrated into our lives, so we wracked our noggins to figure out how we could use our search technology to optimally serve tablet users. Not surprisingly, our research revealed that tablets take on a very different role in our lives than laptops and desktops. Laptops are for work; tablets are for fun. Laptops are task-oriented (“what’s the capital of Bulgaria?”); tablets are more exploratory (“what’s Jennifer Lopez doing these days?”).

So, our goal with izik was to move the task-oriented search product we all use on our computers (aka 10 blue links) and turn it into a more fun, tablet-appropriate product. That means an image-rich layout with an appearance and experience very different than what we’re used to seeing on a laptop.

Type Less, Get More
izik is more than just a pretty face, though it sure is pretty! With izik, your query becomes the starting point to exploring the web. Every query surfaces its own unique set of categories that you can dive into. Type “Kate Middleton” and see results from Gossip, Fashion and more; type “San Francisco” and see results from Sports, News, Travel, Hotels and more.

These categories are what allow you to, as we like to say, type less but get more. Many folks, our team included, find typing on tablets cumbersome. izik is designed to get you the results you’re looking for in as few “keystrokes” as possible. izik uses its categories to provide context to your topic (did you mean buffalo the animal or buffalo the city?) as well as surface fun and interesting topics to assist in your exploration.

One of our favorite times to use izik is when we’re watching TV and want to look up that actor’s bio (we admit it, our tablet is our TV viewing companion). Or when we’re doing some “window shopping” and want to check out sales and reviews. Or sometimes when we just want to flip through some pretty pictures. It really is amazing what you can explore.

Tablet Gestures
Let’s talk about how to use izik for a magical experience. I love a good list, don’t you? Here are the key features you can check out once you’ve entered a topic:

1. Swipe horizontally to view more results within one of the thousands of izik categories
2. Swipe vertically on the page to find more categories related to your topic
3. Expand any result to see more without leaving the page
4. Swipe through expanded results and images
5. Quick answer boxes that help you find what you need right away
6. Pinch to share on Facebook and Twitter

The app is free and ready to download now for iPad and Android. Experience izik for yourself and take Search for a joy ride!

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

…

Get more coverage here:

TechCrunch

Search Engine Land

Washington Post

WebProNews

Common Crawl has built an open crawl of the web that can be accessed and analyzed by everyone. The goal is building a truly open web, with open access to information that enables more innovation in research, business, and education. Common Crawl will use blekko’s metadata to improve its crawl quality, while avoiding webspam, porn, and the influence of excessive SEO (search engine optimization). This will ensure that Common Crawl’s resources and engineering time are spent on webpages that are written by, and are useful to, humans.

We’re putting our full-fledged support behind Common Crawl’s crawl and mission with this donation. We’re not doing this because it makes us feel good (OK, it makes us feel a little good), or because it makes us look good (OK, it makes us look a little good), we’re helping Common Crawl because Common Crawl is taking strides towards our shared vision of an open and transparent Internet.

Just take a look at this excerpt from Common Crawl’s website:

“As the largest and most diverse collection of information in human history, the web grants us tremendous insight if we can only understand it better. For example, web crawl data can be used to spot trends and identify patterns in politics, economics, health, popular culture and many other aspects of life. It provides an immensely rich corpus for scientific research, technological advancement, and innovative new businesses. It is crucial for our information-based society that the web be openly accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it.”

Who could disagree with that?

(Discuss on Hacker News)

MIT Review: A Free Database of the Entire Web May Spawn the Next Google (Hey, isn’t blekko the next Google?!)