There’s a new search engine in town. It’s not the first challenger to Google’s supremacy, but it may be one of the more interesting ones.
According to their About Us page, “Blekko is a better way to search the web by using slashtags. slashtags search only the sites you want and cut out the spam sites. use friends, experts, community or your own slashtags to slash in what you want and slash out what you don’t.”
Blekko has some interesting features. Theoretically, using what they call “slashtags” you should be able to narrow your search to results that are only of interest to you. Each result has a “spam” link. If you click that, you will never see that search result again – that’s a real plus if you are getting a lot of garbage results in your searches.
But there are drawbacks…
Overall I found search results on Blekko to be much LESS useful than on Google even when using the slashtags to focus my search. In the example givenin their video, it looks easy and accurate – in my experience, it is neither.
It my tests, I found that it does a HORRIBLE job with local search. Adding a town and state name to a keyword (a typical ‘long-tail’ search in Google) yields results so varied that they are completely useless. Creating my own custom slashtag produced the same poor results.
I conduct a lot of “one-time” searches and creating my own slashtags for these seems to be a lot of work for little return. If I take the time to create a slashtag, will ever use it again?
I hope that this project grows into something that I can use, but right now I’d have to say it is not ready for primetime. Need results in a hurry? Use Google – or Bing, Yahoo or About.com. If you have time to kill on a new shiny object, give Blekko a try.