It takes a real act of bravery to enter the search market these days. In the wake of Ask's laying off more than 100 engineers and under the shadow of Google's amazing dominance, however, Blekko just recently entered the field. Bucking for the number three position in search, what does it think it can offer that other search engines can't?
The first thing you need to know about Blekko is the learning curve. It's not entirely intuitive; then again, learning how to craft the best Google queries calls for a little practice, too, if you've never done it before. Fortunately, Blekko's home page links to a demo video that is well worth the three-and-a-half minutes you'll spend watching it.
Blekko seems to be trying to combine features of both social sites and more conventional search engines, with a few twists of its own. Take Blekko's “slashtag,” for example. In its simplest form, you can use a slashtag, or even multiple slashtags, to modify a search. It works a little differently from using a keyword, however. You separate a slashtag from your search term by a space and the forward slash.
So if I put “tomato gardening /date” (without the quotes) into Blekko, I'd get links to articles on tomato gardening, sorted to show the most recent ones first. The results are roughly the same as if I'd done a news search in Google for tomato gardening; it saves me a click but makes me do a little more typing.
On the other hand, I can do a lot more with slashtags. For example, I can chain slashtags together. So if I'm interested in the most recent information on growing my own tomatoes, I can put “tomato gardening /diy /date” into Blekko. My top result, dated November 9, carries the title “Tools for Successful Gardening – 5 Vegetable Garden Tips for an Abundant Harvest.” To me, this is pretty darn cool.
You may be wondering where I got the idea to use the /diy tag. That happens to be one of Blekko's built-in tags. They have literally hundreds; you can check out their list.
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