Blekko is one of the newest search engines which a lot of tech sites refer to as “the Google killer”. Clearly, they’re not. But that doesn’t make them any less credible. As CEO Rich Skrenta said in his blog, and I quote: “I don’t believe to be successful in this business you need to be a Google-killer. In fact, trying to be a Google-killer is probably the one sure way not to succeed.”
What is Blekko anyway? And how does it differ from Google or any other search engine there is?
Blekko is concerned about one thing: best quality search results. To achieve this, they implemented an intuitive way to search called the slashtag. Trusted sites are linked to a slashtag so whenever you perform a search query, it prioritizes search results within the linked sites. There are spam icons on each search result which hides unwanted sites when clicked. This will also give a heads up to Blekko which sites are reliable and which are spam.
For example, searching “smartphone /review /date” will show you smartphone reviews by date. Users can narrow down the “/review” slashtag to certain tech review sites such as Engadget, Gizmodo or even our very own Gadgets Magazine to keep results relevant. Sites that sell smarthphones can be tagged as spam so they are filtered out of the “/review” tag. There are also some third party slashtags such as “/youtube” or “/amazon “which lets you search within those sites.
The power of Blekko lies on its crowd-sourced model, which keeps search results up to date and relevant. There are already some predefined slashtags, but users are free to create more themselves. You can share your slashtags to other Blekko users, or even invite them as editors to make your slashtags even better.
There is also a readily available SEO component on your search results. Clicking this will show you host rank, inbound links, site pages, and other handy information about the site. To view Blekko’s site ranking for keywords, you can use the slashtag “/rank.”
Sounds good right? Well true enough it garnered positive response as Wired reports that on their first week, Blekko had an average of 1 million queries a day, making it rank third after Google and Bing.