There’s a new search engine that launched today called “Blekko” which does a much better job at filtering out spam web sites by providing refined search results from trustworthy sources. This is something that Google has missed the boat on. Many search results point to malicious websites that have low reliability and trust, but it looks like Blekko will solve for this.
“The goal is to clean up Web search and get all the spam out of it,” Blekko co-founder Rich Skrenta told The New York Times.
Blekko will not, at least not in the near future or in my lifetime take over the market share in search. Google currently owns 70% of all U.S. searches followed by Bing at 20%. I think this searching engine will have a small following of security conscious users right out of the gate.
What makes Blekko so different than other search engines is the use of a slashtags, a forward slash followed by a keyword or short phrase users can add to the end of a search to limit results to authoritative sources, search specific sites or search by topic.
If a user wanted to search for an iPad on eBay they could search “iPad/eBay” to find iPads for sale on eBay. This method eliminates spam from appearing in search results by providing trusted and authoritative sources .
Blekko is currently offering users a list of several hundred slashtags, but also allows users to build their own custom slashtags.
You can read more about Blekko by visiting the help link here.
This is great news. It’s hard to filter through all the spam and non-relevent sites in Google results. I will begin using Blekko right after this post!
Maybe Google will find a way to do what Blekko is doing with search results or maybe they will just buy out Blekko.
Honestly, all they’ve done is rebuilt Google with a less favorable cost structure and with a smaller index offering less specificity. As an unrelated, does anyone remember Cuil? :-P
Jack,
What I don’t like about Blekko is that it mostly displays searches from well known brands and or websites. It hurts the little guy.