Blekko is a new search engine scheduled to launch at midnight Monday night. I’m sure you’re thinking “Another search engine? Why?”
A few reasons why I like blekko.
Blekko gives you organization. It allows you to do what’s called a “vertical search” in the industry. That is, you can search just a portion of the web. Think Google Images for any web search.
Blekko also gives you personalization. You can define and save a set of web sites for vertical searches. Interested in french cooking? Define a set of web sites dedicated to French cooking. Then, search for things like “how to prepare a chicken” Julia-style. Try doing that in google.
To make vertical searches easy Blekko introduces the concept of a slashtag – think of them as filters. Let’s walk through a few examples of slashtags in action.
We’ll start with a search for blekko (very meta, right?).
I was curious what slashtags were available so I typed “blekko /” and blekko suggested about 10 tags. As I continued to type, blekko suggested tags to go with the letters I typed.
I chose a tag (/seoblogs) and my results included posts just from SEO blogs.
From this search I could see that blekko is getting great press in the SEO world (hello ranking data – we love thee) and getting good funding from Marc Andreessen and others.
Next I wanted to see the most recent posts so I added /date to my query. Blekko sorted the posts chronologically.
Now I was able to view more recent posts leading up to the launch and more current articles discussing how search competition is good and how blekko shares its ranking factors (how it determines which sites to show at the top).
I was curious which web sites the /seoblogs tag was searching so I used the /view shortcut to get a list of sites.
From this page I could see which URLs were being searched and who created the tag. Clicking on the name – Mike – brought me to a user profile page where I could view all of Mike’s other public slashtags (yes you can create private slashtags too), with the theory that if I liked his /seoblogs slashtag I might be interested in others as well.
blekko: how to slash the web from blekko on Vimeo.
As you can see from the video this post covers just a fraction of what you can do in blekko. They have about 20 built in slashtags.
What else could you do? A few ideas:
- embed results of any slashtag search into a dashboard. Create a slashtag of the most important sites to track and embed a search on your brand as well as each of your competitors.
- subscribe to a stashtag search RSS feed to read the latest pages
- get data about how search engines see your web site. Search for “yourWebSite.com /seo” to get crawl stats, ranking data, inbound links (great for SEO) and duplicate pages (bad for SEO).
- discover other web sites – every user’s public slashtags are available for viewing and exporting by all. Last I checked there were around 1,000 user-defined slashtags – and that’s just in private beta
I’ve painted a pretty rosy picture, but there are some “growth opportunities” for blekko as well.
- One of the strengths of web 2.0 is user-generated content, but that takes time. Look for results to get more relevant and more specific as blekko matures.
- Similarly, they’ll need to come up with a way to allow users to contribute to built-in tags. This will be a challenge because it opens the door to unsavory practices – deleting competitors and adding sites that don’t really belong. Wikipedia solves this through a large and dedicated group of voluntary editors. Blekko will need to devise a way for users to make contributions – they need something much larger in scale than just the blekko staff.
- I ran plain (non-slashtag) searches in blekko and compared them to google’s. For one search, cable cast on (a knitting term), blekko had 3.3M results and google had 5.6M. 3.3M is obviously a lot of pages but their crawler isn’t approaching google’s in terms of reach yet.
- Also comparing blekko to google, that search for “cable cast on” at google brought up integrated results, including 3 videos in this case. Blekko doesn’t integrate results (yet?). However, search for “cable cast on /video” at blekko and get back 10 relevant videos. Searching for “cable cast on videos” at google yielded 5 videos.
That last point goes to when a user might turn to blekko. If you have a good sense of what you’re looking for, ie “cable cast on videos”, blekko is a good option. However, if you just want to browse and see what the web has to offer, google is probably the better choice. And that’s OK by blekko.
