It has been well documented this week that Google and Bing are at war. Again.
Google accused Bing of ‘copying’ its search results, Bing denied it, things got heated, the saga continues. You can read about that story here.
In the midst of the drama, search engine Blekko has announced an impressive milestone – in January, the search engine received over 30 million search queries. This equals about 15 search queries a second, or over 1 million searches a day.
It also emerged that Blekko users have created over 110,000 ‘slashtags’ since the sites launch in November 2010.
If there was ever a time to make itself heard, this is most definitely it. With the two search market leaders at each others throats, the need for a more diverse search experience has never been more apparent.
Earlier last week Blekko announced that it was planning to block content forms from its search results. Not an entirely new concept as Google recently vowed to downgrade content farms specifically in search rankings. However, Blekko has one-upped this and has a list of the top 20 offenders (as flagged by users) that it will ban entirely.
This list includes, to name but a few, ehow.com, 123people.com and answerbag.com.
Blekko may be turning a few heads this week, but it’s still a long way off competing for a serious piece of the search market pie.
The company does however have the benefit of being funded by some very generous investors and it has a host of intuitive and unique features that are well on the way to providing the customised search experience the web is crying out for.
What do you think of Blekko? Do you use it? Will it go mainstream? Please share your thoughts below.
