Blekko – A New Search Engine

Well, it appears that we have another new search engine joining our ranks. The search engine is called “Blekko” and it claims to be a new wave of search engine that eliminates spam using a feature called “Slashtags”. A Slashtag is a group of websites that are relevant to a particular topic, e.g. Health, Money, Travel, etc.
Slashtags will be added to the search queries you type in on Blekko to limit the search results to only the relevant sets of sites.
For example; If you were to use the search query “Vaccination”, Blekko will show you the highest quality websites in the health category, thanks to the use of Slashtags.

Because Blekko has only just become up and running, they have a limited number of Slashtags (search categories), so if your search query does not match one of the pre defined categories, Blekko will use proprietary ranking algorithms to deliver relevant results from the 3 billion web pages contained in Blekko.
As more and more users start to use Blekko and more search queries are used, Blekko will create as many relevant sub categories as possible to provide the most relevant search results.

“Today is the first step in a process of building a volunteer army at Blekko that will eventually slash spam from search and deliver the most relevant results,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko.“As the number of URLs on the web increases from billions to trillions, it will take a layer of human oversight to separate the trusted content from the spam.”

So to sum up, it seems as though this is quite a standard search engine that has been created, but with a few new & interesting features/concepts, but ultimately I think it will come down to the fact of personal preference on how successful this will all be. I think it’s going to take a big effort to replace people’s minds from thinking of Google as their No.1 search engine!