Marksonland

In case you hadn't read, blekko launched live to the public yesterday. Here are 10 reflections:

1. The press still loves a good search engine launch. We got a ton of coverage. NYTimes, WSJ, AP, Reuters and pretty much everyone else.

2. Twitter rules. It really is the pulse of what's going on. Searching blekko on twitter (or on blekko) is the best way to get real time time feedback and gauging reaction.

3. Reaction has been overwhelmingly positive so far. Of course there are some haters out there, but whatever. You launch something new its easy for a few people to throw rocks at it. Lots more people seem to really like it. cool.

4. Hype is hard to manage. We have purposefully tried to UNDER-hype blekko. We've said we aren't a Google killer. Our publicly stated goal is to be the third search engine in a world of 2 search engines. Despite this, many people call us over hyped.

5. The little negative coverage we get comes in one of two buckets: (a) we're over hyped or (b) it's impossible to carve a slice of the search business (they wrap this argument in more link-bait-y headlines though). To the first, I can't imagine any start-up would turn down this kind of coverage for their site, so not sure why that is a negative (especially when it comes from marketing types!). The latter is something we obviously disagree with.

6. Note whats missing on #5: no one is saying the search engine sucks. People like everything we're doing. That's cool.

7. Nothing says product feedback like actual usage. We are already hearing great feedback from users and making changes. This thing is only going to get better.

8. The dust will settle soon. After launch, we will have a group of people who are using the site regularly. Maybe they really like our results, maybe they downloaded the toolbar, maybe they made us their home page, maybe they like a particular slashtag or maybe they like our data. All good reasons to come back. Point it, once the dust does settle we'll be focused on growth -but start with a good base. Next up: deals, marketing efforts, feature releases, etc. - the march up the hill begins.

9. BIG THANKS to everyone who gave blekko a try. Hopefully you like what we're doing and will keep coming back.

10. If you've made it this far, you deserve a free tshirt!! They're cool. Drop us a note with your address to shirt at blekko dot com with your address and we will send you one.

blekko is my 3rd start-up. For each start-up I've done, there are always a few events that, looking back, make the highlight reel. Of course the launch is one. But so are things like: 1st round of funding closed, 1st employee hired, 1st press, 1st alpha user, etc. I would put 1st partner deal going live up there with each of those. That's why Im psyched to announce that as of today we have our 1st partnership live with duckduckgo.

Duckduckgo is a search engine run by Gabriel Weinberg. Gabriel is doing some great stuff over there, especially with the Zero-click info he is providing in addition to search results. We're happy to announce that as of today:

- blekko is powering search results for the following categories on duckduckgo: health, lyrics, autos, colleges, hotels, personal finance and recipes. Not coincidentally, those are the categories where we are auto-firing slashtags, so our results are spam free and from high quality sites.

- duckduckgo is powering zero-click info on blekko, on a site by site basis. To access this info on blekko, click on the info button on the second line of any blekko search result. Really great info in there.

We've got a lot more in the pipeline coming out soon, so make sure you stay tuned. But for today, we celebrate our first partner deal - woot!!