Blekko Search Engine: Adding a Human Touch to Eliminate Spam from Search Results

[mouser]

We've had lots of threads on the conflict of interests surrounding Google, and why they may not be all that interested in eliminating all of the massive amounts of advertising based spam from search results.

Blekko is a new search engine site that is attempting to leverage some domain expert information from humans to weed out the useless spam web pages.

..According to CEO and co-founder Rick Skrenta, it’s because the web is filling up with spam and low-rent webpages from content farms like Demand Media, saying the web now has 100 billion urls, most created by bots.

“You need to bring large scale human curation and combine it with algorithmic techniques to bring the quality back,” Skrenta said. “If you have the set of the top 150 health sites, you know what, you really can answer nearly any health question, and you know what, you really don’t want to be searching outside of that set.”

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.

Article on wired.com: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/blekko-launches/

http://blekko.com/

from http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/blekko-launches/

[mouser]

Can someone make a farr alias pack for blekko please?

[Renegade]

I'd like to point out something from their About page:

web search bill of rights
1. Search shall be open
2. Search results shall involve people
3. Ranking data shall not be kept secret
4. Web data shall be readily available
5. There is no one-size-fits-all for search
6. Advanced search shall be accessible
7. Search engine tools shall be open to all
8. Search & community go hand-in-hand
9. Spam does not belong in search results
10. Privacy of searchers shall not be violated

Sounds promising. Just as long as it doesn't end up like Google's "do no evil".

[mouser]

DownloadSquad is not a fan:
"Blekko, the "Slashtag" search engine is slow, cumbersome, and just plain broken"

[Renegade]

DownloadSquad is not a fan:
"Blekko, the "Slashtag" search engine is slow, cumbersome, and just plain broken"

They've got a point.

I tried some searches, but just got too much noise. They've got a lot of work to do still. I had to switch back to my regular search engine to get decent results.

Still, it looks promising. They've got a lot to live up to as the major search engines have such a massive lead, and getting up to par is no minor feat. I'll look forward to seeing if they can do it.

One thing that they've got going for them is a bunch of the "hip crowd" are on their side, like Danny Sullivan, etc. etc.

[timns]

I just gave blekko another try after leaving it for a couple of months. They are getting there. Lots more editors now, and I think they're looking for more.

I signed up quite early and got myself a T-shirt for my efforts 

[Deozaan]

Skrenta said. “If you have the set of the top 150 health sites, you know what, you really can answer nearly any health question, and you know what, you really don’t want to be searching outside of that set.”

But who decides which sites make it into the set and which sites don't make the cut?

Sounds to me like they're censoring the internet but using PR to make us all believe that's a good thing. Sounds like something Apple would try to pull off.

[Tuxman]

I'm quite happy with DuckDuckGo and - sometimes - Yippy right now. Tried blekko, found its basic ideas interesting, but wasn't convinced of its search results. That said, I defined some slashtags for every now and then.