Loading ...After launching on November 1st, Blekko is still gaining a lot of attention. Last week at PubCon, WebProNews had the opportunity to sit down with Rich Skrenta, the CEO and Co-founder of the new search engine, to find out what all the hype is about.
As he explains, Blekko has a feature called slashtags that allows users to attach categories to search. These slashtags are designed to help keep spam out of Blekko, which is a common problem for search engines. In addition to the 200 slashtags that Blekko provides, users can create their own slashtags. Incidentally, users created more than 30,000 slashtags in the first week after the engine launched.
“We’re applying the Wikipedia model to search,” says Skrenta.
Blekko currently applies some of these slashtags to queries automatically to improve the quality of the results. The search engine hopes to implement this automated service at a greater level over time.
On the topic of Ask exiting the search business, Skrenta told us that he only sees 2 search engines: Google and Bing. He went on to say, “Our goal is to be the #3 search engine.”
In terms of SEO, Blekko is being completely open about all the data it collects from the Web. Skrenta says that users can go the site and type in, “website name/link” and see backlinks. Users can also do similar queries in order to gather new backlinks and RSS information.
At this point, Blekko is still receiving around 1 million searches each day, which Skrenta takes as a sign that the model is working.
Do you think Blekko will emerge as the 3rd search engine?
Blekko is great and all, but I think you need to be really tech-savvy to use it on a daily basis. A lot of people use Google just to look up random things because it’s so easy! Emphasis on easy. Blekko offers the powerful slashtag feature, which is awesome. I think it’s a very useful feature that many people will benefit from using. However, I don’t think it’s for everyone. If you’re looking into new search engines, I suggest you check out Bweezy. I like it because it shows you the same Google results you want, but it has cool new features that make searching better. You can view different types of search results (web, images, news, video, blogs, twitter) simultaneously. It’s worth a try.
I tried out Blekko, and I have to say the results are inconsistent, especially for long tail searches. Searches with four words or more tend to show results that hit only one to three of the keywords. This makes the results irrelevant at times.
How is it that Blekko is still in beta? Reading this article, I would gather that it launched on 1st November 2010.
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At this point, Blekko is still receiving around 1 million searches each day, which Skrenta takes as a sign that the model is working.
Blekko is the worst serach engine since Lycos back in the early 1990s, it sucks
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