Blekko Search Engine To Rely On The Human Touch

UPDATE: Read our Q&A with Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta.
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There's a new search engine in town.

The newly-launched Blekko is hoping to harness the human touch in order to present more relevant search results that are spammer and content-farm free.

The company told Reuters that it sees this human-curation element as something Google is missing.

"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 Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta, who described the search engine as "Wikipedia meets search," according to Search Engine Land. "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 how does it work? Blekko, which has branded itself as "slashtag search," relies on slashtags, which are "appended to search queries and limit search results to only the curated sets of sites." For example, if you're looking for information about the iPad, instead of querying "iPad," you could add the slashtag "AppleBlogs" (typing in "iPad/AppleBlogs") to return search results from a limited, curated set of sites. Without using the slashtag, the top five results for "iPad" returned by Blekko are from Apple.com, CrunchBase.com, Wikipedia, Engadget, and CNET. By comparison, if you do use the slashtag "AppleBlogs," the top five results are from TUAW.com, TheAppleBlog.com, MacRumors.com, TUAW.com, and MacNN.com. If you were to try the same search with Google, you'd see that the top results returned are from Apple.com, Wikipedia, CNET, and CrunchGear.com.

While Blekko's idea of marrying human curation to web search on a massive scale is an intriguing one, one of the biggest problems it is likely to encounter is persuading users to--in the words of its tagline--"slash the web." Most mainstream users will most likely not know what a slashtag is, much less why or how they should use it. And the current trend in search--as services like Google Instant and Google Goggles attest--seems to be how to enable users to type less, nor more, when they search.

Blekko has been in development since 2007 and has received $24 million in funding from all-star angel investors such as Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Mike Maples, and Jeff Clavier.

Do you think it's promising? Will you use it? Weigh in below.

WATCH:

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

Comments

[Ryan Jameson]

07:33 PM on 11/17/2010

I saw another article about Blekko and still my thought remain the same. I don't know how much success it will have. Already there are so many search engines, realtime search engines I may add that may already be fulfilling the purpose Blekko intended. I, for one really enjoy Buzzdock -http://www.buzzdock.com- and have developed a loyalty to it. It fits my needs and wants and I think that a lot of people might feel the way I do.

[rotorhead1871]

11:48 PM on 11/04/2010

just a refinement..not a whole new world....not a game changer... this methodology could be utilized on google or bing......kind of a yawner at this point.

[jabailo]

10:08 PM on 11/03/2010

I liked Blekko at first, but it didn't pass my second test.

I wanted to find the Rhapsody music service forum.

I put in "Rhapsody Forum".

On Google the first hit was the right one.

On Blekko, didn't see it on the first page.

I told them about it in their "chat room".

[MyTake]

07:51 PM on 11/03/2010

Thanks for this.

I have immediately adopted the tool bar.

I want to get as far away from Google, Microsoft Bing and Apple as they are feeding all of their Internet activity recorded on their servers directly into NSA data farms which is housing that global population database.

It is such a pity that the fast food eating Americans have never been able to control their corrupt corporate monopolies (from Standard Oil through to Microsoft) and the control they exert over government.

[rotorhead1871]

11:49 PM on 11/04/2010

then quit using the US invention.....the internet...cry baby....

[MyTake]

10:42 AM on 11/05/2010

No sir, the U.S. invented a "Bulletin Board" System (a fine fellow at IBM invented it).

Tim Berners-Lees wrote the first HTTP program. He was from England and worked at CERN.

Didn't they teach you this in history class!

[Odrade]

05:23 PM on 11/03/2010

I'd use it as long as it works well. It's all about finding what I'm looking for and adding a slash tag is almost no work. Key is that it needs to work, but looking at people's comments it seems it does not.

[tenderlung]

06:29 PM on 11/03/2010

the slash tag idea is great but it seems like their base search function has some problem. it would have been awesome if they'd sold this idea to google.

[tenderlung]

05:12 PM on 11/03/2010

Terrible. I always use the same test for search engines. I search 'Kame', which is the nickname of a popular japanese popstar, Kamenashi Kazuya. If his wikipedia entry is in the top five hits, I'll consider using the search engine again. His name appears twice in the top five google results. It's not even on the first page of either blekko or bing - except in the image results. Even if you blekko kame /wiki, he's still not on the first page. Google's competitors have a long way to go before they understand the kind of information people are searching for and the way that they search for it.

[rotorhead1871]

11:50 PM on 11/04/2010

agree....the googleplex is a top performer....

[bessielil]

04:44 PM on 11/03/2010

Google seems like a positive sounding, easy to say name.

Blekko sounds like a cross between Blagojevich and Blech. Not good.

[american-dolt]

12:09 PM on 11/03/2010

ya bleeko results

[Tobin Michael]

11:26 AM on 11/03/2010

I just tried it. The results were not very relevant and then when I chose a site a commercial popped up. Forget it.

[SwingingFromCenter]

04:32 AM on 11/03/2010

Ironic that they use as an example a search for Apple products when discussing a new, more complicated way of searching. You know, seeing as how Apple users are the most technically inept of all of them.

[onlythetruthcounts]

03:02 AM on 11/03/2010

Can I get an online car insurance quote using Blekko?

[Viewcaster Net]

09:07 PM on 11/02/2010

Done before. DMOZ.org and About.com are both editor reviewed search directories. Sometimes interesting, but Google's advanced search technology trumps all. Don. http://www.viewcaster.net/

[rikster]

06:35 PM on 11/02/2010

it wasn't that impressive...

[EricBishop]

06:33 PM on 11/02/2010

FAIL

[supergenius02]

05:21 PM on 11/02/2010

Clear business fail. The tech world is being carved up between Apple and Google and there will be no food on the table for anyone else unless you align yourself with one or the other.