Web Secret #130: Blekko.com

Does the world need a new search engine? For me Bing is a fail. I don't get it.

That said, thank you New York Times for turning me on to Blekko.com, a search engine that might actually offer something useful and different than Google.

As the Times article noted:

"Rich Skrenta, Blekko’s co-founder and chief executive, says that since Google started, the Web has been overrun by unhelpful sites full of links and keywords that push them to the top of Google’s search results but offer little relevant information. Blekko aims to show search results from only useful, trustworthy sites.

Blekko’s search engine scours three billion Web pages that it considers worthwhile, but it shows only the top results on any given topic. It calls its edited lists of Web sites slashtags. The engine also tries to weed out Web pages created by so-called content farms like Demand Media that determine popular Web search topics and then hire people at low pay to write articles on those topics for sites like eHow.com.

So for example, people who search for a topic in one of seven categories that Blekko considers to be polluted with spamlike search results — health, recipes, autos, hotels, song lyrics, personal finance and colleges — automatically see edited results.
Users can also search for results from one site (“iPad/Amazon,” for instance, will search for iPads on Amazon.com), narrow searches by type (“June/people” shows people named June) or search by topic, [e.g. “mental health /psychology” or "social work jobs /colleges.]" Blekko has made hundreds of these slashtags, and users can create their own and revise others."

Or as they explain it:

blekko: how to slash the web from blekko on Vimeo.

Slash on.