Blekko, the long anticipated search engine founded by Rich Skrenta, has finally opened to the public. The service offers an interesting way to “slash” or create specialty search engines for any topic, along with new features the company hopes will improve relevancy. My previous article, Blekko: New Search Engine Lets You “Spin” The Web, goes into great depth about the core features you’ll find at Blekko today, so I’d encourage you to read through that. Below, I’ll provide an update on a new features added since my review of Blekko was written in July, when the service opened to a small group of testers. I’ll also revisit where Blekko sits in terms of challenging Google. Slashing Web Search Into Special Topics
Slashtags, as my previous article explains, are a way that anyone can make a “vertical” search engine around any topic. For those not familiar with the term, a vertical search engine is one that lets you search in a specific area of interest, rather than across the “horizontal” spectrum of all interests. Google is a “horizontal” search engine that lets you search for anything. Google News, in contrast, lets you drill into one slice of interest, news content. While Google has a variety of specialized search engines of it own, there’s no easy way for a Google user to decide they want a “tea party” search engine, or a “liberal” search engine or a “comedy” search engine. Blekko allows this. You simply browse a list of topics to find the right slashtag to use. For example, this search: honey /beesAllows you to find web pages about the subject of “honey” but only from web sites that someone has picked that are related to the topic of bees. That means you avoid getting matches such as a movie called “Honey” or an open source spam tracking project, which Google turns up. Read more: Search Engine Land
Read more: Blekko
Slashtags, as my previous article explains, are a way that anyone can make a “vertical” search engine around any topic. For those not familiar with the term, a vertical search engine is one that lets you search in a specific area of interest, rather than across the “horizontal” spectrum of all interests. Google is a “horizontal” search engine that lets you search for anything. Google News, in contrast, lets you drill into one slice of interest, news content. While Google has a variety of specialized search engines of it own, there’s no easy way for a Google user to decide they want a “tea party” search engine, or a “liberal” search engine or a “comedy” search engine. Blekko allows this. You simply browse a list of topics to find the right slashtag to use. For example, this search: honey /beesAllows you to find web pages about the subject of “honey” but only from web sites that someone has picked that are related to the topic of bees. That means you avoid getting matches such as a movie called “Honey” or an open source spam tracking project, which Google turns up. Read more: Search Engine Land
Read more: Blekko
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