Blekko - new revolutionary search engine

It's been quite a long time since two brilliant students from Stanford University indexed the Internet of that time. Nowadays, our needs and practices regarding the network searches are a bit more sophisticated. Not only are we looking for unique information in an increasingly sophisticated ways, but also discern a growing awareness of the World Wide Web and the World Wide Noise. Cataloging digital information slowly ceases to be an ideal job for soulless algorithms and becomes the arena in which the artificial or collective intelligence will be more important.

For many years we have been observing the struggles of those who attempt to enter the market of Internet search engines. New start-ups are based on two philosophies. The first involves the improvement of the Google's solution, the second – introducing on the market a completely new quality. So far, in several locations around the world only the first one has given rise to viable projects. The example of the second approach is Wolfram-Alpha search engine. However, it is possible to make thing much easier and much more interesting – to listen to your users and to trust their intellect. This is the approach that was adopted by the creators of a new search engine Blekko.

Blekko is a completely new project that is currently being tested by 500 people from around the world. Why is this search engine different from others? It offers so-called "slashtags". Despite the enigmatic name, the technology is very simple to use. A slashtag is a special word declared in the query typed in the browser window, which allows to properly select and sort search results. Suppose, we are interested in information on the stock exchanges in New York, but only those originating from the liberal sources. With Blekko, it is enough to use the query, "NYSE /liberal" to get the desired effect. The word, liberal, followed by a "/" is this mysterious slashtag.

Slashtags can classify information available on the Internet in various ways – by the source, its type (e. g. forums, blogs, shops), names (e. g. yahoo), subject (e. g. startrek) or the publication date. They also allow to get the information only from certain other search engines (e. g. /bing /google). Blekko currently offers 250 predefined slashtags and allows you to create your own according to your needs.

But that's not all. Developers have given the users the possibility to remove unwanted pages from search results. By clicking on a small Spam link, a user can report a website as spam and this site will never be presented again in search results to the person who found it to be worthless. Blekko users will have access to site rankings and statistics. Publishers will benefit from the possibility of accessing the information that Blekko uses to estimate the popularity and relevance of web sites.

Now the simplest question raises – will Blekko succeed? There is no doubt that this project responds to many needs associated with the effective network searches and simple design makes the chances of its rapid growth relatively quite high. The creators of the new search engine seem to found the balance between the challenges of the future and the possibilities of the modern technology.