Blekko is the latest search engine model to emerge on the market and offers an interesting alternative to the likes of Google or Bing.
Blekko’s intuitive ‘slash tag’ system allows users to make ‘vertical’ searches around any topic by allowing them to ‘slash in’ what they want and ‘slash out’ what they don’t – essentially reducing spam.
A recent review of Blekko by Danny Sullivan on searchengineland.com demonstrates the use of slash tags as follows:;
A generic search in Google for the word ‘honey’ generates the following results:
As you can see, the results are varied.
In this case, we’re not interested in the movie ‘Honey’, but we are interested in finding results for honey from bees.
Blekko’s slash tag system allows us to do this. By inserting the slash tag ‘/bees’ after the word honey, Blekko should only serve up relevant results:
Much better.
Let’s take another example. If you Google the word ‘android’, the whole first page of Google is full of sites related to the Android mobile operating system.
But what if we are looking for information about androids in a scientific sense – robots, or synthetic organisms if you will. Then we can use the slash tag ‘android /science’. You get the picture.
There are already 100s of topical slash tags on Blekko, from political slant slash tags such as /conservative and /green, which will serve up results leaning towards one or the other, to the ‘/date’ slash tag will rank search results in date order.
There are also a host of third party slash tags including /twitter, /youtube, /amazon, /flickr and even /yahoo or /google. Blekko also allows you create and share your own custom slash tags.
The founders of Blekko are under no illusion that knocking Google off of the search engine top spot is near impossible for the foreseeable future, so instead focus on offering users a unique search experience. In their opinion, this will be a faster and more efficient way of searching due to the ability to filter out marketing spam.
Blekko Co-founder and CEO Rich Skrenta commented in a recent blog post: “So let’s just get this out of the way: there is no such thing as a Google killer. No company is going to play David to their Goliath and slay them with a well-aimed stone from a slingshot. Google is here to stay.”
Our view? We like it and it is an interesting concept but Rich Skrenta is correct in stating that it won’t be a Google killer…
