Blekko: Search Engine with A Difference

Launched in November 2010, Blekko is an alternative search engine that promises a unique search experience and offers a downloadable search bar. It uses slashtags to bring up results for user searches.

Why is Blekko Different?  

All search engines provide results based on user search. These results are numerous and often include irrelevant and unreliable results. Blekko cuts out spam, results from content farms, and is malware free. The search is focused on quality websites that involve fewer pages using slashtags to group websites related to relevant topics to offer better search results. This search engine has an open policy that states that its search shall be open and people oriented, offering ready web data and custom results. This is based on the belief that search and community are interrelated and that spam has no place in search results. They also promise not to encroach on user privacy and have a strong policy about collecting information. Search histories are not tracked. If users do not wish to enable tracking, no information is stored or collected.

What are slashtags?

A slashtag is defined as a custom search engine that can be created with ease and it is used as a search filter to produce high-quality results minus the spam. A list of websites is attributed to a slashtag, so that when that particular tag is used in search, only those websites are screened for results which can be obtained in chronological order.

Existing slashtags created by Blekko can be used for search or custom slashtags created to suit the user.  

Blekko’s user-oriented goals

The goal is to provide a solid search experience via relevant and superior results where the content is categorized for ease of use. The advanced search technology is used to power Blekko’s range of offerings, which includes its web search engine, its mobile app, and social updates platform. This technology is an exclusive system, which uses the content from the web to filter out quality results that match specific slashtag filters.

While the core product at Blekko is basically web search, they recently introduced a search app for iPhone and Android devices called izik. This underwent a revamp and the new app has a local search feature via which users can locate local businesses by searching the relevant categories.   

The social news platform powered by the Blekko crawler is called ROCKZi, which can be embedded on user websites to attract traffic and feed it with fresh content.

Blekko’s aim is to make a phenomenal difference to the user experience through improved web search and the results provided. It relies on the presumption that users are ready to help and improve the results they see by creating custom slashtags. The goal is to eliminate junk results that have no value for the user. Instead, the user will enjoy zero-spam search results, which is what was required in the first place.