Blekko Search Engine Aims to Rid Web of Spam

Search engines seem to be a dime a dozen, but more often than not, as soon as one is announced, it seems to disappear right off the map. The reason is obvious… to come out and give people a compelling reason to use your search engine over something like Google or Bing is one of the biggest challenges I can think of. So to have any chance of competing, you need to innovate.

That’s what new search engine Blekko hopes to have done, by giving people filtered results that aim to get rid of any and all spam. Despite having a name that sounds like a bodily function, Blekko relies on editors to help sort content on the Web, and when a user searches for a query, the results should best suit it. In my tests so far, results have been all over the place, but there is potential here.

To help filter content even further, the search engine utilizes slashtags, which due to the fact that they’re handled by editors, tend to give better results than simply adding a “+ word” to your query. At least, that’s the hope. For some websites, slashtags have been already created, and for us, as an example, there’s a slashtag for /linux, so that all results listed has to do with content we’ve posted in the past.

I’m not 100% sure on how Blekko handles everything, but I think I might use it instead of other search engines for a couple of days and see how reliable it feels. If you also give it a shot, please feel free to relay your thoughts of it in our thread!

Blekko plans to introduce auto-slashing for additional categories moving forward, but selected to launch with ones that represent a high volume of search traffic and are typically laden with spammy results. Health, lyric and financial queries on Google or Bing, for instance, will return results dominated by poor quality content farms or malware-hosting sites. Those same searches on Blekko yield results only from high quality sites.