I was setting up a fresh Rails 3 app and the following bit me.

$ rake spec:models
rake aborted!
Don't know how to build task 'spec:models'

After some head scratching and a closer look at the docs, I realized that I had forgotten to add the rspec-rails gem to my development environment. I had it in only the test and cucumber environments. Seems like an odd thing to do, but it lets you run the various rake tasks in dev.

In Gemfile:

group :development, :test, :cucumber do
  gem "rspec-rails"
end

Blekko versus Google for an example search.

Please note right from the start that I’m not doing this to pile on. If I didn’t think that Blekko was in the process of making something awesome, I would simply stop using it. I’m writing this so that someone can tell me what I’m doing wrong, or as a bug report. Or both.

Searching for Cucumber docs

I was trying to execute the following search, intending to find the documentation for the selectors in Cucumber.

rails cucumber should select within

Here’s what I found in Google.

Uploaded with Skitch!

And my Blekko setup for /rails.

Uploaded with Skitch!

And the Blekko search results.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Clearly there is a disconnect here. I’m inheriting the /blekko/rails tag, and I even added the exact host.domain from the #1 Google result. Yet, I get back zero results and some non-relevant web filler.

I gave Blekko a good trial, but it’s not quite ready. It’s noticeably slower than Google, and the results aren’t as good for non-programming queries. Obviously this is highly subjective, and it makes sense that my programming queries would be better since I took the time to customize them. There’s still potential here though. I suspect that Blekko will succeed, and I will certainly try them again in a few months.

Also, it seems that Stack Overflow results are appearing higher up on Google than they were just a few weeks ago. Is it possible that the leech sites are getting what they deserve in their page rank?