Blekko.com - New search engine that blocks spam and content farms
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Up and coming search engine
With $24 million in venture funding, Blekko certainly has enough firepower to take on the herculean task of improving Internet search.
Lots of people wonder why search has to be improved at all. Market-leading Google seems to be doing a pretty decent job, after all, and No. 2 Bing is holding its own. What can Blekko offer that other search engines don't already?
Plenty, as it turns out. Blekko allows you to mark a site you find useless as spam. In any subsequent search, that site will not be shown to you again. You can narrow your search using what Blekko calls "slashtags." It's a method of personalizing your search that seems easy and intuitive to many people who have tried it out. The site also offers search tools that some people find intriguing, especially for finding backlinks to a website.
Saying "no" to spam
In response to concerns about content farms and other poor content dominating search results in Google and everywhere, Blekko took unique steps in February and March of 2001 to make its search engine stand out as being tough on spam. In early February, Blekko took the first move and completely blocked 20 websites that it thought were the worst spam offenders -- like eHow.com, robtex.com, 123People.com, AnswerBag.com and FreeWebs.com. Then, on February 23, Google released a search engine algorithm changed that people are calling the Farmer update -- it was intend to improve search results and diminish rankings of content farms that have little unique content or don't satisfy searchers. In early March, Blekko blocked 1.1 million websites from its search results entirely.
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Have you tried Blekko? What do you think of it? Leave your comments here by clicking on the edit pencil above.
