Blekko, a new full web search engine anticipating its release from beta, is presenting a unique way for users to refine and filter their searches.
Christine Pepin
Lead Media Coordinator
Over the course of this hour, I’ve accumulated nearly 10+ tabs in Mozilla worth of information around a new search engine called Blekko. Since the engine is still in closed private beta, only a few have been able to test it out, after requesting access and receiving an invite. I too have inquired to be apart of this group, but I’ll have to wait to see if I get in the club. In the meantime, here’s a breakdown of what I’ve learned from the cool kids that got to play around with it.
Blek-oh Background
Blekko is a web search engine like any other that crawls billions of web pages and indexes content on the web. They are not yet positioning themselves, however, to be bigger and better than any of the major three engines, as most surpass them with regard to size of content indexed, relevancy and speed. Over 2.5 years ago, Co-founder and CEO Rich Skrenta had just left his previous company, Topix, and began development on this new product. Since then, there’s been nearly $20 million in financing raised from angel and venture investors in Silcon Valley. It’s rumored that the new engine will be released to the public in late-summer.
Blekko Differentiates from Google
Over the last year especially, we as marketers and consumers have all seen the face of Google change. At one point, Google seemed to be a very basic system. It’s apparent now, though, that there is nothing linear about Google anymore. When we make searches, we expect to be connected to a wide range of multimedia, all within one search engine result page. Or, if you’re a more advanced searcher, you may look to place your search within one of the vertical search pages, to begin your targeting one click sooner. Blekko takes a similar approach but in a way that I find is far more robust and user-friendly, in a query refinement tool they call Slashtags. These slashtags are basically keywords you place after what you’re searching for, but go beyond the “site” modifiers on Google (i.e. Images, News, Blogs). Blekko maintains nearly 250 slashtag options, including viewpoints such as liberal/conservative, religious affiliation or news vs. gossip and can then be combined with additional qualifiers such as /date, to filter recent results. In addition, you can also create your own slashtags based on a set of personally defined URL groupings.
For a demo of Blekko and slashtags in use, I encourage you to view the video from Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.
Can a Search Engine Really be Transparent?
Answering the above question is always tricky. As marketers, we would love to have all the behind-the-scenes answers, but we’re confident Google will never release them. So, needless to say I’m skeptical when I read that Blekko is aiming to be completely transparent with regard to their ranking algorithms. When using the /rank slashtag, Blekko reports a final score to each website that appears on that particular search result. You can even drill down further to determine why it ranked where it did, including whether the keyword is in the domain name or anchor text, as well as title factors such as title and H1 tags. In another view, users can look at the link distribution by region, and the breakdown by inbound, outbound and internal links with their respective anchor text. Although this data is slated to be free and easily accessed through each search listing, I suspect that Blekko will develop this intelligence into a paid offering. Users will need to take this data, however, with a grain of salt as the ranking data shown is specific to Blekko’s algorithm. What is listed can not be applied across any of the major engines, as the ranking criteria and weights to these factors differs. I believe there is value, though, in helping new SEO-comers diagnose areas or their site that need improvement.
If I’m granted an invite to try out Blekko in beta, I’ll let you all know and provide a follow-up to this post. For a more detailed view and screen shots that will make sense to the points I discussed, visit Danny Sullivan’s post from Thursday.
Blekko is definitely a cool new search engine. The slash tag feature is unique and gives it an edge that people will be interested in. However, I do not think it will ever reach the popularity of Google due to it’s complicated nature. I think Google’s greatest strengths is it’s simplicity; it’s so easy anyone can use it to it’s full potential. Blekko is not like that.
Coming from someone who doesn’t have a lot of time on her hands, having to learn how to use a search engine does not appeal to me when I have Google available. Of course I took the time to learn about Blekko, but I’m in the industry. I don’t think the average person will want to do that.
I’ve done some research and I think the best new search engine is Bweezy. Similar name, but very different from Blekko. Bweezy offers Google results, which I love. It also lets you open search results in the same window as the search, which eliminates the need to open a ton of tabs! I’d check it out if you’re into new search engines.
Thank you Malena for your feedback. Our team does proof our work and has others read over them as well. If you have a particular example, we can change it immediately. Thanks!
So much info in so few words. Totolsy could learn a lot.