Index technology is very well-known and pretty straightforward. You crawl the web. The quality of your search results are a function of your algorithm, and the depth/breadth of your index (created by this crawling). Blekko is attempting to outsource the algorithm part. Rather than play the cat and mouse game with spam sites, why not let power-users define what the best is, and then only return those results to others. Integrating the social graph is actually an incredibly powerful and compelling way to do search.
If I search for "digital camera", it might help a bit but if I were looking for the opinions of my photographer friends, I'd just ask them.
If I search for "us air strikes in libya" it might help but I would expect an algorithm to be able to find me some decent news articles without too much help from my friends. Besides, I don't want to live in my friends' 'filter bubble'.
If I search for "AT91SAM9G20 datasheet", I doubt anyone in my immediate social graph has even seen what I'm looking for, let alone +1'd it.
If I search for "AT91SAM9G20 datasheet", I doubt anyone in my immediate social graph has even seen what I'm looking for, let alone +1'd it.
That's true, but then how many competing documents are going to pop up? The social graph helps give precedence when their are many results.
The Libya example is interesting. If you want outside of your bubble there is no reason you couldn't reverse the order and try to see news that none of your friends have seen (or at least +1ed).
