Blippex: By the People, For the People
October 17, 2014
Would Blippex be the search engine Alexis de Toqueville would love? The search engine is, according to Bloomberg, “a new crowd sourced public search engine.” Blippex makes use of technology developed for Archify, a system providing users with access to their online history. According to CrunchBase, the system has received seed funding of $700,000.
A year ago, Blippex was described as “the first interesting search engine since Google?” Like Qwant, Blippex is a search system crafted in Europe. Like Qwant, Blippex has ambitions for nibbling into Google’s market share for Web search.
The idea is that the search system is “built by its own users,” a phrase used in the Quartz article to describe the system. Quartz continued:
One of Blippex’s key selling points is that Kossatz and Baeck [the founders] are fanatical about privacy. Though Blippex constructs its search results on the basis of data gathered from its users, it does it in a way that’s anonymous and untraceable to any individual Blippex user. This obsession with privacy allows Blippex to rank pages—i.e., decide which pages to show people—with an algorithm that Google can’t match, because if Google gathered the data that Blippex does, users would find it unacceptably creepy.
Blippex does not track its users. One of the key technologies for the system is WebRTC. WebRTC is an open project that enables Web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple JavaScript APIs. If you don’t want to fool around with browser add ins, you can use Blippex like any other Web search system.
I ran a query for “enterprise search.” The results were interesting. I did not know that sold state drives were related to a search by a sheriff’s department or to Lenovo.
The order of the results is determined by the amount of time a user spends on a page. This is the “dwell time.”
Worth a look. A privacy centric European search system will have its supporters. The challenge, of course, is that Google dominates Web search in Europe. What is Google’s market share? 80 or 90 percent? Perhaps European regulators can adjust this situation?
Stephen E Arnold, October 17, 2014
Blippex for a Different Kind of Search
October 17, 2013
Since Google came to dominate the internet search landscape, many rivals have launched. Some have found varying degrees of success, but none have come close to overtaking the master. Now, blogger Christopher Mims believes he may have found a contender in Blippex; “This Is the First Interesting Search Engine Since Google,” Quartz declares. We also found Blippex interesting.
Mims notes that, unlike most competitors, Blippex is not trying to reinvent the Googly wheel. Its approach is different. Instead of indexing the web in general, Blippex looks only at pages its users have visited. The article explains:
“Blippex’s algorithm, called DwellRank, decides relevance based on how long users spend on a site and how many times Blippex users have visited it. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have, independently of the Blippex team, established that the amount of time someone spends on a web page or document is, not surprisingly, a pretty good measure of how important and relevant it is (pdf). Blippex gets this information by having you download a plugin for your web browser. This plugin measures how long you spend on each site and sends the information to Blippex, anonymized—that is, stripped of any information that could identify you.”
Isn’t this approach a bit limiting? For now, yes, but the makers of Blippex liken the young site to Wikipedia, which became much more effective as users contributed information. Currently, says Mims, the site’s user base is mostly geeky early adopters, so it is a good place to go for programming questions. It is also adequate for recent events, he writes, but is not the place for more obscure searches. With the limitations, why bother? Well, Blippex’s “fanatical” commitment to privacy is one reason; like DuckDuckGo, the site does not track its users. They even made their browser plugin open source, so folks can verify that it is not collecting private information. And, of course, the results will get better as more people install that plugin.
There remains one question—how will Blippex make money on this ad-free site? If co-founders Max Kossatz and Gerald Bäck have figured that out yet, they don’t seem to be sharing the answer. The company, based in Austria, launched last July.
Cynthia Murrell, October 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Blippex Takes a Fresh Approach to Web Search
August 29, 2013
This is an interesting angle: search that considers time users spend on each site, rather than the usual indicators, like link quantity and quality. GigaOM informs us about this unique approach in, “How Blippex Handles the Data Behind its Time-Driven Search Engine.” The premise is that users spend more time on sites that offer more value.
The budding Blippex is still working with a fairly small index, which is understandable considering it launched this year and has just started to get some traction. Though the Berlin-based company could have chosen to use one of the clouds floating over Europe (not literally), they are going with the web-startup flow and choosing Amazon Web Services. They are also relying on several open-source components, like MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Redis. See the article for more details on Blippex’s use of those resources.
Writer Jordan Novet explains the unique approach, and points out one possible hitch to the time-spent model:
“The database Blippex uses keeps track of how much time users spend on a given website. The system has a way of making sure pages that sit idle — think of the tab that’s been open on your browser for three days — don’t get incorrectly interpreted as being the most valuable. . . .
“The thing is, web surfers might spend much more time poring over dense content, such as a paper in an academic journal, than on, say, a succinct news article about the same subject, even if the article is more successful at giving people just the information they’re looking for. In that case, time spent is not the best indicator of value.”
Novet makes a good point; we happy geese understand the value of a short, informative article. I checked out the site, and there is a slider aptly named “dwell factor,” with which the user can adjust how much influence time spent has on the results. If I don’t want to rely on dwell-time, though, why shouldn’t I just use Google? Well, privacy is one reason. Like DuckDuckGo, Blippex refuses to collect and share users’ information. In fact, they say, the Duck inspired their privacy policy.
Curiously, Blippex has yet to reveal how they plan to make money on the service. In fact, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, the company claims to have no business model in mind at all. Now that is a daring approach!
Cynthia Murrell, August 29, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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