Blekko Slashtag Search Engine Promises No Spam: Should Google Be Scared?

A big splash ensued October 31, 2010 with the announcement of the release of Blekko Slashtag Search. Blekko finally went into a public beta status on November 1, 2010 and Rick Skrenta, Blekko's CEO, acknowledges that the search engine's name is, well, a bit odd, to say the least. Nevertheless, the (not so) new entrant into the field dominated by giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing promises that a name is not everything and has no impact on the search engine's function, as it shouldn't. However, in a day and age of technology and start ups, a name could easily make or break a company. Nevertheless, the potential for Blekko's new way of searching the Internet is vastly appreciated and could easily take over Internet search if given a chance.

While Google has always sought dominance over the search engine market and is still doing quite well in holding over 85 percent of the global search engine market share as of October 2, 2010, Google makes constant improvements, over the Google Search functionality. Blekko, with all of its massively useful and easily appreciative functions, might dominate Google Search in time-if it can find a better name, anyway.

Blekko Slashtag Search Company History

Blekko is already three years old and started in 2008. Since then, it has been under wraps and under development the entire time. When the idea came to light in 2008, it has already raised a second round of funding totaling $3 million in equity on the basis that it would have a value of over $23 million after all the investing was said and done. Now, the company is well-funded, with over $25 million in venture capital placed so far and the public beta version is available to all who want to try it out.

Why Blekko? It's Just Another Search Engine, Right?

Well, yes it is and no it is not. There are several things that make Blekko search a potentially significant threat to the established order of dominating search engines such as Google, Yahoo and, yes, even Bing.

First, and potentially the most significant point, is that it is a spam free search engine. Yes, that's right, spam free. Through a combination of their proprietary technology and a user feedback system that works much like Wikipedia does, Blekko search technology can deliver search results that are virtually free of the "Order your 'Blank' here" results or the dozens of sites that get themselves listed by bidding for the keyword no matter what it is. Simply replace "blank" with your search term, no matter how little sense it makes or what relevance it offers to the searcher and you get the idea of the results seen on Google. Anymore, search engine users must sift through three or four pages of spam results to see any results that hold some kind of value to what the user is searching. Blekko promises to change all this with their slashtag technology.

The Slashtag Principle

Ah, yes... Now on to the "Slashtag." The brilliance of this technology becomes apparent once you spend a few minutes on the site. There are a number of built-in Slashtags that sit just under the result heading including Tag, SEO, Links, Cache, IP, Chatter and, of course, Spam. The Spam option allows users to tag any result as spam. These options are the ones automatically available to those who have not changed the settings. To view the detailed information or change the settings to see more or less tags about a result and its corresponding website, clicking the "pref" link on the top right corner offers an interface in which the user can check or uncheck an option. Then, if that information is available, the tag automatically pops up under the search results.

For example, anyone can now see a website's AdSense ID. Yes, AdSense ID, that means that you will see the sites in which ads appear on and track who really is who using what ads. There is so much more and a lot of it is geared around giving users the ability to view a site's SEO information, IP address even the page code. Blekko appears as an anti-commercial site as its entire focus centers on allowing users to edit not only whether a site is spam but other slashtags that help categorize the site and other results like it. Users can even edit a new slashtag with other users.

Google Killing Machine?

Anti-spam, user interactive, semantic driven with a Wiki-style social networking quality. This is a potentially game changing entrant into the search engine market and one that should be closely watched by two groups, ordinary users wanting real information rather than just another opportunity to spend, and the people that profit from such websites. Could this be the beginning of the end of the SEO industry that Google helped establish? We can only hope.

It's hard to imagine searching for something and only seeing results relevant to the search term, isn't it? Blekko is worth a least a visit and a bookmarking, maybe even resetting the default search engine. This is only the beta and I for one am anxiously awaiting what comes next. Check back soon for an entire Blekko Search Engine review and walk through on how to use it and its various functions.

Sources:
About Blekko Slashtag Search Engine
Claire Cain Miller, "A New Search Engine, Where Less is More," NY Times Online
Michael Arrington, "Stealth Search Engine Blekko Gets Money From Marc Andreessen, SoftTech," TechCrunch