ReadWriteWeb

Innovative web search engine DuckDuckGo has partnered with massive collaboratively built how-to site Wikihow to offer permanent top-level results for how-to searches on the site. DuckDuckGo is aimed straight at Google, going as far as buying a prominent billboard in San Francisco condemning Google's data tracking practices. Wikihow is aimed right at eHow, content farm Demand Media's massive how-to site of questionable quality.

The twist to the story is that the founder of Wikihow, Jack Herrick, actually sold eHow to Demand Media in 2006. Herrick chose the wiki method of collaborative editing over the bulk freelance model of eHow. "It's like eating a McDonald's burger vs. a wonderful, home cooked meal," he told ReadWriteWeb in 2009.

Large quantities of low quality content, of marginal relevance, intended to draw visitors through search, but drive them to click through ads to other sites - that's what's called a content farm. The voices of critics of Google are getting louder with allegations that the world's leading search engine has been thoroughly gamed and is now drowning in content farmed links. Content farm is a very subjective designation, though.

Search startup Blekko is betting that web users want to search without seeing results from companies that are pumping out low-quality content just for the ad revenue. But is one person's low quality content another person's more-accessible reading material? Today Blekko released a list of the top 20 domains that its users have clicked the "SPAM" button on in their search results. Content from those sites will never show up in a Blekko search again, the company says. What do you think of this list?

"RSS is Dead", tech sage Steve Gillmor said in May of 2009. I know that's not true, because I spend a lot of my work and my leisure time reading RSS and other forms of syndicated content feeds.

If you're not familiar with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) - it is, in the simplest of terms, a powerfully simple technology that delivers new content from multiple websites to one single place you've subscribed to RSS feeds from. RSS has not changed the world in the ways its early adherents hoped it would, but it continues to change dramatically the lives of some of us unafraid to play around with it a little. Below are the 10 most exciting RSS and syndication technologies of the past year.

Blekko has a refreshingly different interface to search, and a generous data-sharing philosophy, but what I didn't realize was how innovative its underlying technology is. Last week I sat down with CEO Rich Skrenta and CTO Greg Lindahl, and they took me on a fascinating tour of the system they've built.

Starting with the hardware side, they have around 800 servers in their data center, each with 64 GB RAM and eight SATA drives giving each one about eight terabytes of local storage. The first thing that caught my attention about this setup was when they explained why they avoided RAID.

We seem to make a lot of predictions that new features and products launched by the likes of Facebook, Google, or Twitter are going to be "killers" of some sort. Facebook Places, for example, could be a "Foursquare killer." Facebook Messaging could be a "Gmail killer." A new analytics product from Twitter will be a "Klout killer." Often, as these examples indicate, these predictions come at the expense of startups.

The author of the web's first worm-virus, teamed with a man who dresses as a medieval warrior and goes to battle on the weekends and a woman who follows World of Warcraft, acupuncture and ballet, have raised $24 million dollars to storm the gates of the Google Castle. They got incredible press coverage when their new search engine, called Blekko, launched this week - but they are probably going to get slaughtered.

In the meantime, they have provided an opportunity for countless other freaks and geeks to use the magical tool they've built to grow our stature wherever we work; to cut through information overload, to shine a bright light on opportunities and to augment our minds with the snap of a finger. Read on for my advice about how to use Blekko and we'll use it well - for as long as it lasts.

My first post for ReadWriteWeb, just over 1 year ago, started with the premise that search was “game over”, that Google had won and the only space left was (re)search - what users do after the basic search.

None of the search start-ups since then has made me change my mind. None of the cool new user interface features or ways of expressing your search intentions matter one iota, if the core search proposition is not better from day one. Well, enter the latest contender: Blekko.