Blekko, a new $24 million search engine designed to eliminate spam search results has been launched in public beta after three years in the making.
Using 'slashtag' technology the engine attempts to separate queries into one of seven categories: health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels. Every time a Blekko user’s query is determined to be in one of these categories, Blekko will automatically append the associated slashtag to the query and limit results to just the subset of URLs that fall under that slashtag.
Blekko plans to introduce auto-slashing for additional categories moving forward, but selected to launch with ones that represent a high volume of search traffic and are typically laden with spammy results.
"Health, lyric and financial queries on Google or Bing, for instance, will return results dominated by poor quality content farms or malware-hosting sites. Whereas the same searches on Blekko yield results only from high quality sites."
The search engine is hoping to use the 'Wikipedia formula' to expand its service, in that a small percentage of users will work together to build out slashtags for the majority of Blekko searchers.
So far approximately 8,000 beta testers have created more than 3,000 different slashtags.
I don't want to be cynical, but let's be honest, it's either going to fail, because of Google, or succeed and be bought by Google.
Check it out and see what you think.
Is there a need for slashtag searching?
Source: CNN