Blekko – Another Google killer?

Search: PPC & SEO — By Ching-Yun Huang on August 19, 2010 10:34 am

Pretenders to the Google throne

Since 2008, a few search engine start-ups have joined the search war to compete with the world’s most powerful search engine, Google. Many claimed to be Google killers: like Cuil, the search engine that defines itself as the ‘coolest’, or Wolfram Alpha, the search engine that claims to be the only one to provide all the answers you need. But how many of these new search engines ever got popular? The answer is none.

Cuil is basically dead while Wolfram Alpha is struggling to be recognised by users as a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. You may be wondering, if new search engines may never be able to compete with those search giants, why would I want to talk about Blekko, a search engine that most of you have never heard of?

The answer is simple, because it is different.

Blekko is a search engine that aims to provide transparency to all web users. Its principle is to make web data directly available and ensure search is open. The search engine was first spotted in the wild in 2008 with the image of a paper bag puppet and nothing more.

It wasn’t  until this year that I heard about it again, when it finally announced it’s under Beta testing, and is about to launch.

What makes Blekko different?

It lets you SLASH THE WEB (like a ninja!). The enforcement of Slashtag in Blekko makes it easy to obtain search results only relevant to what you want (or kill off the results you don’t want).

Let’s use the movie Inception as an example (great film if you haven’t seen it). When you type Inception into the search box for a general search, the results usually contain anything to do with the word inception. But if you simply want the results to be related to the movie, just use the Slashtag in the search box to define your search result.

-    If you’d like all results related to the movie, type in : Inception /movies
-    If you’d like the results from blog post, type in : inception /movies/blogs
-    If you’d like only the pictures, type in : inception /movies/pictures

Slashtag not only benefits users from having a easy way to redefine their search result, it can also work as a way to access tools and API available from Blekko.

-    If you want to limit your search results from only twitter, type in Inception /twitter

-    If you’d like to see only pictures from flickr, type in Inception /flickr

-    If you’d like to watch video from YouTube, type in Inception /youtube

What I like about Blekko the most

It provides web data that is usually available from the backend or SEO tools. If you look at the search results, every result all comes with a SEO and a Link hyperlink. By clicking these two links, you can easily get the website data relevant to search engine optimisation, both on-page and off-page.  It even allows you to make data comparison for up to four websites.

So is Blekko a Google Killer?

I don’t think so, and Blekko doesn’t think so either. In terms of search relevancy and website indexation, there’s still a very long way to go before Blekko can reach what Google has achieved today (and Blekko knows it well). That’s the major reason why Blekko lays low, and only aims to become the third most popular search engine instead of No.1.

To conclude, Blekko is a very likeable search engine as it brings users fresh search experiences.

Try it, you might like it!