image via bigmouthmedia.com
Blekko has been in development since 2007, but it has only recently become available to the public. Blekko is a search engine that has its sights on Google’s business. To do this, they are focusing on what they can do differently.
The New York Times reported, “Rich Skrenta, Blekko’s co-founder and chief executive, says that since Google started, the Web has been overrun by unhelpful sites full of links and keywords that push them to the top of Google’s search results but offer little relevant information. Blekko aims to show search results from only useful, trustworthy sites.”
Out of curiosity, I ran Alexa web statistics on Blekko to see how they were doing. Over the last 30 days, their website traffic has increased 12.7%. Alexa also had the following to report on Blekko, “Blekko.com’s three-month global Alexa traffic rank is 21,705. Search engines refer roughly 11% of visits to the site. The time spent in a typical visit to this site is about four minutes, with 43 seconds spent on each pageview. The site is located in the US. Compared with the overall internet population, Blekko.com appeals more to men; its audience also tends to consist of childless people earning over $60,000 who browse from work and school and have postgraduate educations.”
Blekko uses slashtags to help you get more accurate results. Some are calling Blekko the slashtag search engine because of it. If you are not familiar with slashtags, searchenglineland explains them: “Slashtags are a way that anyone can make a “vertical” search engine around any topic. For those not familiar with the term, a vertical search engine is one that lets you search in a specific area of interest, rather than across the “horizontal” spectrum of all interests. Google is a “horizontal” search engine that lets you search for anything. Google News, in contrast, lets you drill into one slice of interest, news content.”
Think of slashtags as something like this: drdianehamilton/books. By doing this search, it pulled up more specific information about my writing. It can be helpful to make the search more specific.
Why the name Blekko? Co-founder, Mr. Skrenta, used to refer to his personal computer in college by that name.
For more information about Blekko, check out the following link from WJS.com.
If you would like to know what Blekko has to offer, check out the following video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AQObs5r16w&fs=1&hl=en_US]Related Articles
- Alternative search engine Blekko launches (cnn.com)
- Blekko, The “Slashtag” Search Engine, Goes Live (Danny Sullivan/Search Engine Land) (techmeme.com)
- Blekko, The “Slashtag” Search Engine, Goes Live (searchengineland.com)
- Alternative Search Engine Blekko Launches to Eliminate Spam in Search (mashable.com)
Blekko is definitely a cool new search engine. The slash tag feature is unique and gives it an edge that people will be interested in. However, I do not think it will ever reach the popularity of Google due to it’s complicated nature. I think Google’s greatest strengths is it’s simplicity; it’s so easy anyone can use it to it’s full potential. Blekko is not like that.
Coming from someone who doesn’t have a lot of time on her hands, having to learn how to use a search engine does not appeal to me when I have Google available. Of course I took the time to learn about Blekko, but I’m in the industry. I don’t think the average person will want to do that.
I’ve done some research and I think the best new search engine is Bweezy. Similar name, but very different from Blekko. Bweezy offers Google results, which I love. It also lets you open search results in the same window as the search, which eliminates the need to open a ton of tabs! I’d check it out if you’re into new search engines.
So, it’s a new search engine… does it provide a link to submit a site, just like other search engine?
Never heard of Blekko before today. I typed a very specific search for my local credit union into the address bar of Google Chrome. Instead of getting a Google search Blekko popped in from nowhere and instead of the specific site popping up Blekko displayed four other sites above the one I was trying to get. I went into Chrome options and reset my preferred search to Google, did the search again and this time obtained the desired site as the first search option. It doesn’t appear that Blekko’s intended purpose of delivering only highly relevant results worked out in this case of mine. If you were to ask me, having my Chrome browser preferred search of Google hijacked to use Blekko instead, and having Blekko deliver four suspicious results above the one that I very specifically typed in information for is REALLY REALLY REALLY suspicious.
I’ve heard others tell me that the Ask site has done that.
Blekko does seem like a good search engine when it comes to narrowing down searches but i am not sure if it is as user friendly as Google. I think the ones that will use Blekko are the ones that are internet savvy. I am not sure if the average person will use it. It is great for web designers or developers. Great tool to use for a client because the search results can get really precise to a few results rather then Google where EVERTHING shows up!