I'm not sure about that... Aesthetically it looks like something from 2005, and it's incredibly cluttered.
The light blue and lack of underline on the result titles makes it really difficult to read or skim them. The results are also vertically very close together. Sliding panels are weird, it feels like it's hiding relevant information. Three different fonts that don't go together. The two icons in the search box are different shades of gray. It doesn't feel like a website that an actual designer put together.
Also from the perspective of actually using this as a search engine, I can't really figure out what advantages there are over Google. It seems like the only difference is that things are grouped into categories. And the categories aren't even relevant. Look at a search for Arrested Development (http://blekko.com/#?q=Arrested%20Development) (one of the suggested searches on the homepage). Some links are categorized into "Movies", others "TV". Also, "Top Results" is for some reason second from the top.
It's not just the UI, the interesting part is the categories. People have been trying to do clustering/categories for 15 years, and the results have usually been laughably bad!
When you have categories, you can present diverse results (maybe I wanted apple recipes when I typed Apple?) and you can avoid query reformulation when a query turns out to be overly generic.
Now I don't know if you're interested in alternative medicine or not -- and we've got those results separated so you can either read or ignore them.
You'll probably wonder why we have both health and hearing in this result. The hearing category is websites dedicated to hearing, while health contains more generic health websites.
All of this doesn't work perfectly -- the [Arrested Development] movie/tv example is a good example of how we go wrong sometimes.
Not really. Why on Earth does stuff like this make it to the front page? It's literally a link to a search. It's not news. There's no further analysis. It's just the submitter's opinion. Oh look, something new happened to a search engine no one uses. Time to let everyone on Hacker News know.
I couldn't even get search results to show up until I turned off blocking of Google Analytics in Ghostery. Then I could see what search results turn up, which is always my first test of any search engine.
I do not know how the page used to look.
But I think, given the 'nestedness' of the information they want to display, this is not a bad way to go about it.
To make things feel a bit less cluttered, I would make the category buttons an equal width.
(I'm confused as to why a seach on 'lama' doesn't give the animal category)
The categories are selected using the web graph, not using a semantic database. Lama has so many categories that 'animal' got pushed off the end of the list. [llama] doesn't get animals, either.
Another query with a similar problem is [java], which doesn't have a category about travelling to the island.
Reminds me a lot of what Clusty was trying to do, if anyone remembers that site.
Not sure I'm sold on the design, it's a bit flashy/sluggish and there's definitely some bugs that need polishing - for instance, if you use the scrollbar on the right stuff will get pushed up or down off the screen a bit requiring you to scroll to reposition everything after you click one of the tabs. Also there's a boxy feel which de-prioritizes the actual search results, which isn't helped by the "more/less" arrows that float over the text whenever the mouse is nearby.
I like the idea of Blekko, but this feels like a step trying to be more accessible while making the product less robust.
My first thought was "minimalism is one thing, but this is taking it a bit far". Then I realized they had actually designed a search engine UI (which is fundamentally a text box and a button) that requires Javascript.
People insist on having autocomplete in the text box, and that requires javascript. The results display engine is html5 and is shared with our tablet and phone apps.
I like my web pages to center on my wide monitor. When I see pages that don't do that, I assume an amateur did the page. However, obviously Blekko is not designed by amateurs. I wonder why they chose to have the page hug the left edge of my monitor.
The light blue and lack of underline on the result titles makes it really difficult to read or skim them. The results are also vertically very close together. Sliding panels are weird, it feels like it's hiding relevant information. Three different fonts that don't go together. The two icons in the search box are different shades of gray. It doesn't feel like a website that an actual designer put together.
Also from the perspective of actually using this as a search engine, I can't really figure out what advantages there are over Google. It seems like the only difference is that things are grouped into categories. And the categories aren't even relevant. Look at a search for Arrested Development (http://blekko.com/#?q=Arrested%20Development) (one of the suggested searches on the homepage). Some links are categorized into "Movies", others "TV". Also, "Top Results" is for some reason second from the top.