Posted on Monday, November 8th, 2010 by Annat Katz
blekko – This new search engine is boldly going where other search giants have gone before, with the mission of delivering a spam-free search experience. How do they do it? With slashtags. These slashtags are essentially your search’s focus keyword by which blekko organizes the accurate relevant results, all from trusted sources while leaving out all the irrelevant (and malware) ones. As TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington had written in his review on blekko back in July 2010, slashtags “like /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs, or any combination, make it very simple to quickly filter results to what you are looking for.”
In addition, users are invited to create their own slashtags and make these public so that, similarly to the ‘everyone’s-an-editor’ concept of Wikipedia, other users can later make use of these public slashtags for their own searches, and get curated, high quality results. See the video below to learn more.
I’ve included a screen shot of a blekko search I performed using the slashtags: /science /date to get a filtered list of relevant results, organized by date (from most recent to latest). This, for example, is a search you can’t do on Google. I invite you to try and search blekko using the ‘reday-made’ slashtags to begin with, and then if you’re interested, create your own user and slashtags for future searches by users.
Another feature blekko offers that is worth mentioning is their transparency graphs related to inbound traffic, SEO and other interesting analytical data that has always been free and open, but blekko is the first to make it all easily accessible in one page. Simply click on of the light gray words under each search result and a world of information will open before your eyes. See below the interview by Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch TV, talking to blekko CEO Rich Skrenta, to learn more.
