99 ROCKZi Boards on the Wall

Posted on November 8, 2012 by ann

In one month’s time, what do you get when you launch a new feature and get a nice mention in TechCrunch? In our case we get over 100 websites that have added ROCKZi boards, including NFL team the Houston Texans. Another recent partner is Club Website, a UK football league website service that provides sites for 39,000 teams ranging from youth to semi-pro. Club Website now has ROCKZi boards about UK football on all of their sites. We are obviously excited at this quick and overwhelmingly positive response. We are also thrilled that the value of adding a ROCKZi board to your website is clear – high quality content, pre-wired into social networks, drives traffic.

If you have a website – be it for personal or business use – you can add relevant, compelling content simply by adding a couple of lines of code that we generate for you. Another bonus is that the board activity drives traffic to your site, not ours. You reap the social benefits of every share, up vote, and comment on your embedded board. Try searching under News Boards for your topic of choice, and if it doesn’t yet exist, create one in 20 seconds or less.

 

 

You may have read our blog post about the “Embed” feature, and now you’ve seen some examples. But what’s better than checking out other sites? Trying the feature out for yourself!

We hope you’ll join the 100+ sites that have added ROCKZi boards to their websites.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Tech Talk About blekko’s Operations Monitoring Infrastructure

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Greg

On September 28, I gave a talk at the Surge conference in Baltimore, titled “Monitoring and Debugging Big Clusters Running Real-Time NoSQL Apps”. Here’s the abstract:

Running a big NoSQL cluster used for data-mining Map/Reduce jobs in production is challenging, but fairly common these days. Keeping up a hundred+ node NoSQL-based cluster serving sub-second responses to fickle web-users can be terrifying, for both operations and engineering staff. We’ve been operating such a system at blekko for two years now, and we’ve learned the hard way about the kinds of monitoring, debugging and debugability features needed to survive without pulling out too much of our hair. Come and learn from our mistakes!

If this sort of thing interests you, please take a look at the video and slides!

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Update: SEO Tools 30-day Free Trial

Posted on October 30, 2012 by ann

We have had a great response to the new release of our SEO tools!

We are pleased to offer a 30-day Free Trial of the blekko SEO tools. Just sign up, and you will not be charged if you cancel within the first 30 days. Please try it out — we’d love to get your feedback!

https://seo.blekko.com/land

 

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A new blekko search tutorial

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Greg

[blekko /blogs]
There is a new blekko search tutorial over on the blekko help website. It starts with the basics and then describes blekko’s advanced features, most of which do things which you just can’t do on any other search engine!

It will teach you about:

  • search basics
  • using slashtags to improve your results
  • creating your own custom, curated slashtags
  • using exclusive, boosted, and auto-boosted slashtags
  • using date-sort and date-range slashtags
  • using blekko to create alerts and rss feeds
  • embedding blekko search boxes (even with custom slashtags!) on your website

Please give it a look, and let us know if you found it helpful! You can contact us on twitter (@blekko), email (support@blekko.com), or by leaving a comment here.

Posted in Features | 2 Comments

Blekko SEO Tools: Get Unparalleled Data to Help Drive Traffic

Posted on October 18, 2012 by ann

We are pleased to announce our new and improved SEO tools! We have the great features you’re used to from blekko — duplicate content, inbound links and outbound links — and now we provide even more SEO data. Blekko performs 120 million searches per month through the 20 billion pages it has indexed, over 100 million of which are updated daily. This data allows blekko to provide up-to-the-minute SEO data from the unique perspective of a search engine.

Our subscription-based service has a sophisticated interface and comprehensive data that provides developers with important ranking metrics to help optimize and drive traffic to their websites. The new features include page analysis and SEO report cards, inbound links based on category, full link reports, and instant SEO access from blekko’s search engine. As a subscriber, you can look up as many urls as you want, including SEO data for competitors.

We’d like to highlight a few of the new features we mentioned. The Inbound Links report has gotten a major upgrade in the form of realtime updates! We show you the newest inbound links and provide links to the exact articles or pages where your site is being mentioned. Underneath the realtime feed, you can access a list of domains, their host rank, and number of links that point back to your site. Given blekko’s commitment to spam-free search and editorial prowess in curating slashtags, you can bet we are returning high quality sites.

Another cool way we present this data is organizing inbound links by category. This is especially unique to blekko thanks to our slashtag technology, which organizes high quality websites by topic. Now for SEO purposes, you can see which topics drive the most traffic to your site. For the New York Times, in the image below, some of the main categories of traffic sources are politics, sports, and science. When mousing over the circles, you will see the top sites that are linking back to your website.

Now for the SEO Report Card. The idea of report cards may conjure up flashbacks, but this is the kind you want to pore over. When it comes to the mysteries of site performance, this is where we break it down. We evaluate 45 factors, organized under larger areas of Anchors, Url, Content, Performance, and Links. Not only do we give letter grades but we provide detail and context so you understand what’s working and what’s not! With this information, you can effectively tailor your site for optimization.

You may have wondered what exactly a crawler indexes on your web page. We provide exactly that kind of insight in the Sections report. We tell you how many page sections were looked at, how many were included, and how many were excluded. This is honey to obsessive data geeks. And we mean that in a good way!

In addition to knowing who is linking to you, wouldn’t it be grand to know where you’re being mentioned? The Domain Roundup wonderfully tells you all about your web presence. Here you will find links, summaries, and timestamps of recent pages that mention your domain. You will also get a list of similar sites (great for benchmarking) and listings where your domain is mentioned.

That’s just a glimpse of the new blekko SEO tools, folks. As CEO Rich Skrenta eloquently put it, “Blekko’s premium SEO tools give developers unique and often privately kept data about web domains content. Unlike other search engine analytic tools which only show general data on inbound links, our premium SEO tools provide full data reports that can be used to compare SEO stats between sites and direct SEO access from blekko search result pages.”

We hope you are as excited about the blekko SEO tools as we are, and will check them out!

**Edit: Find out about the free trial here.

Posted in Features, SEO | Tagged | 7 Comments

Technology at blekko

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Greg

Whenever I speak at conferences, someone always asks about the technology that drives blekko. Here’s a peek into the scale and the technology behind our search engine.

A whole-web search engine needs to crawl and index billions of webpages. It’s hard to say how many webpages there are, because most webpages are generated by web spammers. Our current cluster of 1,500 computers can crawl and index 4 billion webpages. We use over 10,000 hard disk drives, similar to the biggest one you might buy for a desktop computer. We have 3,000 flash, or solid state disk drives, similar to the drives you might have in a new laptop. The total amount of text in these 4 billion webpages is one petabyte, which is about 500 billion times the size of this blog posting.

blekko combinators exampleWe store all of the data in a special database system, of a type known as NoSQL. It has some pretty unique features that make developing a search engine easier than usual. If you’d like to learn a bit more about our database and how it aids writing a search engine, there are two blog postings over at highscalability.com which describe it in detail:

One unusual aspect of our system is that we don’t use the technology called RAID to make our disks more reliable. You can read about how we get reliability with more consistent performance and faster rebuilds in this blog posting:

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this peek into the technologies that underlie a modern search engine!

Posted in Features, Technology | Comments Off

Powering web apps with the blekko API

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Greg

You’re familiar with the blekko.com website, but you might not know that blekko also has an API, which enables programmers to write programs that run searches at blekko, and do interesting things with the results. One well known example is Flipboard, which uses blekko to find feeds of stories about any topic.

We ran across a nice new example over the weekend, thanks to a web app developed at the Rails Rumble 2012 hackathon. The Rails Rumble took place over a 48 hour period last weekend, and one of the teams produced a web application named Earmarkd. Earmarkd built their own custom-curated slashtags to return political results for the left, right, and center (aisle) viewpoints for any topic, from abortion to zygotes.

earmarkd header

Check it out! And if you’re interested in the details of our API, drop us an email to apiauth@blekko.com.

Posted in Features, Partnerships, Technology | 2 Comments

Own the Water Cooler: Boost Your Traffic with ROCKZi

Posted on October 5, 2012 by ann

We launched ROCKZi to help bring communities of like-minded people together to discuss and comment on relevant and timely content. Hot on the heels of “Create a Board,” we are taking it to the next level and giving you the tools to embed fully customizable ROCKZi boards on your own website. Social content, people. About any topic. On your site.

Example of a ROCKZi board on a website.

We believe discussions on topical content are best served where experts reside. ROCKZi’s “embed” feature provides a powerful platform to bring content, conversations and traffic back to site owners. All the content is pre-wired into the holy trinity of social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) – so when you add a ROCKZi board to your site, every share, tweet, and pin will drive links and traffic directly to your site, not rockzi.com. Go ahead, you can say it. That ROCKZ!

There are a lot of social news sites and aggregators out there. We want to provide you with a toolkit to add the functionality of social sites onto your own website. Adding a board requires very little effort, yet the feature is chock-full of easy-to-use tools that allow you to create boards based on your interests and customize them to fit your brand. You can even feature your own original content. It’s a fantastic way to share your voice and perspective on what you care about.

You can find the “Embed” button under the title, in the center.

Quick and easy customization tools!

Customized, primed, and ready to go!

Have a tech blog? Embed Geekery. Do you write for a website about parenting? Add ParentZ. Or as we mentioned, tailor the board to your site by creating one from scratch. Own your expertise, engage users, keep them coming back for more!

Here are a variety of websites that have put ROCKZi’s functionality on their site. Go ahead and give it a try - add a board on your site and let us know what you think!

Earth Echo - marine and environmental awareness
Beats for Boobs - breast cancer awareness
Faculty eCommons (1) - online course enhancements
Faculty eCommons (2) - learning technology tools
Guitar Shop TV - guitars and music scene
Bikelane.com - cycling
BottleCount- wine
BurnsMoto - motorcycles
Curious Bits - arts and culture
Glinka - classical music
Photodrug - photography
Reagan News - conservative politics
Sutherland Gold - tech
We Are Notre Dame - Notre Dame football

See it in action right here!

 

Posted in ROCKZi | 5 Comments

Share the Love! Create Boards on ROCKZi

Posted on September 6, 2012 by ann

We are excited to tell you all about our new “Create a Board” feature on ROCKZi! As the product evolves, we have you in mind, dear User, and ways you can get more out of ROCKZi. What better way than to put the power in your hands to create boards based on your interests?

Sure, we have over thirty great boards to peruse, running the gamut from politics to entertainment, but what about those niche topics that really make your eyes perk up – your favorite band, theremin, baking – you get the picture.

Because ROCKZi is a social product and relies on viral growth, user-created boards are interactive and shareable for the ROCKZi community. As the creator of the board, you will get credited, score karma points, and have editing privileges. The board itself will be available for all to enjoy, and open for article submissions.

To create a board, you can use the search box in the drop-down menu to see if a board already exists. If it doesn’t, you will get to a page that gives you the option to create it. Here, I did a search for “ny fashion week” in the search box.

You can also click “Create Board” at the top of the page to go directly to the “create” page.

Once you hit the “create” button, you will see a preview of your board along with a list of feeds to get you started. You can delete the feeds you don’t want. As the board creator, you can also delete individual stories at any time – whether they are generated by feeds, added by you, or submitted by other users.

Hit “Accept” and voilà! Shiny, new board.

The boards you create will be accessible via your user profile and the menu search box. A handy tip as you create boards: make your topic search as clean and direct as possible, and watch out for spelling errors. This will allow us to return the feeds that are the best fit.

When we started out with our original batch of boards, we took the same approach as our blekko slashtags in that we manually curated high quality news and blog sites. At the same time, our coders have been honing the system to automate some of the process. Whether curated or crawled, we look for sources dedicated to topics as well as news results to grab board content. Since we look for news feeds that are about specific topics, there may not be enough content for some board ideas. For instance, vanity boards may not work out, unless you’re famous like Britney Spears.

In the rare instance where ROCKZi doesn’t float up content when you feel it ought to, contact us and we will do our best to bring the board into existence!

Check it out and let us know what you think. Happy board-creating!

Posted in ROCKZi | Tagged | Comments Off

Blekko Goes to BlogHer

Posted on August 13, 2012 by ann

Today we bring you an interview with our director of business development, Nicole Patterson, and original content editor, Adrianna Gould. Adrianna and Nicole were the lucky gals from blekko who got to attend BlogHer, a conference attended by thousands of women (and some men too) to network with fellow citizens of the blogosphere.

You’re accustomed to going to library conferences, so BlogHer is a different scene. This is also the second year you attended. What does blekko value about BlogHer that keeps you going back?

AG: BlogHer is a conference focused on women who blog. These women have powerful stories and an audience of readers. There are brands there trying to get bloggers to talk about their products. This is a very powerful and inspiring group of women. Blekko wants to be part of the conversation.

Give us a sense of the vibe at BlogHer. I want to hear it all – the energy, the sessions, the big-name speakers, the parties. What is the big draw for bloggers and exhibitors?

NP: BlogHer is a lot of fun. You can feel the energy and everyone seems genuinely excited to be there. I was inspired by all of the women there who blog in their free time as well as hold down jobs and run households. They feel they have valuable information to share so they take the time and effort to write about it.

AG: This year Barack Obama, Katie Couric, and Martha Stewart were some of the speakers addressing the bloggers. You’ve got exhibitors giving away lots of fun women-focused products. And then you’ve got the awesome after-parties, so you can imagine how much energy there is at the conference.

Syndication seems to be an important takeaway for attendees. How can bloggers use blekko and ROCKZi to their advantage?

AG: Bloggers can submit their articles to ROCKZi boards. We have over thirty topical boards, including CraftZ, which is about crafting, and ParentZ, which is all about being a parent. I’d also encourage bloggers to check out blekkogear, where they can get free badges, widgets, and search boxes for their site. Lastly, we’ve got great SEO tools that bloggers can use to get analytics for blog traffic.

You mentioned people got excited about ROCKZi. What did they love about it?

AG: It’s a new digital offering that has a lot of potential. Brands can create custom ROCKZi boards to engage with their audience, and a lot of companies were getting excited about that. I heard people saying that it’s tough to find fresh content, but ROCKZi pulls in all the fresh content using blekko’s realtime crawl of the web.

Which session stands out to you?

NP: I attended “Blogging for the Love of It” where they talked about ways to earn money through blogs that are very low touch.

What was your favorite piece of swag?

NP: A lot of organizations had great swag, I liked the homeopathic booths where they were giving away full-sized products like Oscillococcinum and Zicam.

AG: I loved the free trade bracelets from India. The company was supporting female entrepreneurship abroad, paying fair wages to make the bracelets.

Outside the conference activities, did you get to see some of the sights? What was your favorite New York moment?

AG: The New York delis are awesome. You can’t get a sandwich like there anywhere else. I saw a Broadway show, of course. But my favorite moment was having dinner at Birdland, this famous jazz club that’s been there since the 1940s. There are candles on the table, a neon sign in the window, and red velvet curtains behind the band. It was an unforgettable night.

Tell me about Sparklecorn! Is it as amazing as it sounds?

AG: Yes, it is…. Imagine an open bar, a unicorn cake, a DJ, and a room full of bloggers dressed to the nines and dancing the night away. Oh yeah, and throw in some unicorn balloon hats and rainbows.

Any tips for first-timers planning to attend BlogHer13?

NP: Bring lots of business cards and marketing materials to give out.

AG: Bring an extra duffle bag in your suitcase, because you are going to need room for all that free stuff. Don’t be intimidated by all the new faces; just strike up a conversation and make a new blogger friend. And bring a sparkly dress for Sparklecorn.

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