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Blekko has seven main categories -- health, automotive, lyrics, colleges, personal finance, recipes, and hotels. If you search for "investing in bonds," for example, Blekko gives you a good set of results from SmartMoney, MSN’s Money Central, Mint.com and several others. The interesting part is that users can create their own ‘slashtags’ -- sets of web pages covering particular topics -- so when these are added to a search query, results are restricted to those from these particular sites. Other users can contribute to the lists of relevant sites for a particular slashtag, if their creator allows it.
blekko: how to slash the web from blekko on Vimeo.
The reasoning behind Blekko’s approach is that the web has increasingly become saturated with spam-like websites, specially designed to artificially boost ranking in Google's search results, but whose content is heavier on marketing pitches than substantive information. The company says they’re on par with Google and Bing for regular non-slashtag queries, but their aim is to become popular as a secondary search engine for certain types of queries that can be easily filtered by topic. In fact, the team believes Blekko could be profitable with 1 million to 2 million queries a day (out of the over 1 billion now done on the Web) and claim they have no illusions of unseating Google anytime soon.
It’s an interesting concept that focuses on quality rather than quantity. We’ll see how things develop as more people create and refine slashtags, but perhaps the most difficult part will be getting in users’s mind when thinking about search.
User Comments: 34
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tehbanz said:
Finally a safe way to find lyrics, im so sick of these bogus lyrics sites with seedy popups and "send these lyrics to your phone", why the hell would i want lyrics on my phone?
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limpangel said:
taea00 said:Average users can't even decide whether / or \ is a forward slash.
Hahahahah ... so true.
taea00 said:I think another big draw back to Blekko is that it's highly dependent on the community.
Agree. This might be their downfall.
Also people new to this engine might come to try it out, but most of them expect Google like functionality like Instant and others. This is why they will not explore the engine further than one or two random searches.
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Just tried it out and I love it!, watching the video is a must though for knowing about its various features.
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Again, competition is healthy in the marketplace. It only drives each other to improve on their current product/service.
I'll give this a shot, but as others have stated. It's hard to change people's habits. But who knows, hopefully it works out for them.
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Just tried it out and I love it!, watching the video is a must though for knowing about its various features.
That could be part of the issue of this catching on also, people want things instantly. They don't want to have to watch a video to figure out how to do something. This is really a shame but its the way the world is headed.
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I just googled a search then used blekko for same it seems google is a bit more accurate & both search engines seem to have relatively different results besides when you google you get links to maps,images etc. Love the slashtag feature because when you need news google brings out years old results.Though blekko will need a lot more to compete with google.
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I am fearing that in the end google is going to buy it out.
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looks good.. time only can tell how much market share it can steal from Google, & Bing
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Resistance is futile. Someone will purchase this and squander it's ambitions away.
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