Back in 2010, an alternative search engine called Blekko emerged. It came from Rich Skrenta, co-founder & former CEO of Topix and NewHoo (which went on to become The Open Directory Project or DMOZ). It aimed to crowd source search by using the public to refine its algorithms and make search results more relevant and less spammy.
IBM has acquired its technology and team for Watson.
If you go to Blekko.com now, you’ll just see this:
IBM says the acquisition will provide Watson with more content to offer in its products and services. From the announcement:
Blekko brings advanced Web-crawling, categorization and intelligent filtering technology. Its technology crawls the Web continually and gathers information from the most highly relevant and most credible Web pages. It uses classification techniques to create thousands of topical categories, making that data more useful and insightful.
These capabilities complement the recent acquisition of AlchemyAPI as well existing technologies available on the Watson Developer Cloud. The combination of these technologies will further assist our clients in applying cognitive computing toward making more informed, evidence-based decisions.
A metaphor to understand how this works is to think about the information on the Internet and other sources as a vast underground oil field. Blekko’s technologies are like oil exploration and production teams that locate the high-quality oil, drill, and deliver it to the refinery. AlchemyAPI’s technologies, together with Watson’s existing capabilities, are like the refineries that refine the oil into a multitude of finished products, such as gasoline, heating oil or jet fuel. IBM and its partners then distribute insights to the points of impact, the way tanker trucks deliver fuel to gas stations or depots.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has updated is guidance to the search engine industry regarding the need to distinguish between advertisements and search results.
Search industry veteran Danny Sullivan wrote a letter to the FTC just over a year ago calling upon the commission to scrutinize Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Nextag, Twenga and TripAdvisor, with regards to the disclosure of paid listings. It’s unclear whether today’s update comes as a result of Sullivan’s letter, but it seems pretty likely.
The FTC has sent letters to search engine companies noting that in recent years, paid search results have “become less distinguishable as advertising”. The commission said in an announcement:
The letters are the latest example of the FTC’s work to update its guidance for digital advertisers, which also includes recent updates to the Dot Com Disclosures and Endorsements and Testimonials Guides. The letters also respond to requests from industry and consumer organizations to update the 2002 guidance.
According to both the FTC staff’s original search engine guidance and the updated guidance, failing to clearly and prominently distinguish advertising from natural search results could be a deceptive practice. The updated guidance emphasizes the need for visual cues, labels, or other techniques to effectively distinguish advertisements, in order to avoid misleading consumers, and it makes recommendations for ensuring that disclosures commonly used to identify advertising are noticeable and understandable to consumers.
The letters note that the principles of the original guidance still apply, even as search and the business of search continue to evolve. The letters observe that social media, mobile apps, voice assistants on mobile devices, and specialized search results that are integrated into general search results offer consumers new ways of getting information. The guidance advises that regardless of the precise form that search takes now or in the future, paid search results and other forms of advertising should be clearly distinguishable from natural search results.
The guidance has been directed at AOL, Ask, Bing, Blekko, DuckDuckGo, Google, Yahoo and seventeen other specialty search engines.
Blekko has just launched a new smartphone version of its mobile search product izik, which until now was only for iPad and Android tablets.
The app, now available in Apple’s App Store and in Google Play, tries to emulate the tablet experience, while adding a local search element lacking from that version.
Blekko’s director of product management and design, Daniel Swartz, tells WebProNews that a smartphone version of izik has been the most requested feature. The tablet version, he says, sees users spending 12 minutes per session, and averaging 1.6 queries per session, with 70% of its user base being returning users.
People use tablets more for content, while they use their smartphones on the go, Swartz says, which is why izik for the smartphone is getting the local search (or “What’s Nearby?”) feature. It gives you eight categories to find nearby places: Banks, Bars, Cafes, Gas, Grocery, Health, Movie Theaters, and Restaurants.
The feature is not available for izik on tablets, but will be eventually.
When asked why the company chose to go with a different brand for izik, rather than just sticking with blekko, Swartz tells us there was no real concrete reason, and that they just wanted to try something different.
Earlier this month, news came out that Blekko both reduced its staff, laying off eight people, and raising a new $6 million round of funding.
Blekko has both reduced its staff and raised new funding.
According to a report from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land, who had an email exchange with CEO Rich Skrenta, the company laid off eight people earlier this week as part of a cost-reduction effort, but Skrenta reportedly said, “blekko’s revenues are growing and these cost reductions will help us as we work toward profitability.”
Skrenta also reportedly told Sterling that blekko has closed a a new $6 million round of funding, bringing its total funding to $60 million.
Last week, blekko announced the launch of a new redesign, which leverages the API the company built for its mobile app izik, and breaks down search results into categories, as well as providing more results per page.
“Blekko’s new search results page will move away from the standard search result status-quo and introduce a remodeled homepage with an innovative new way to display results,” a spokesperson told WebProNews. ”This new design will break down the spam-free search results into categories that will make it easier than ever for users to sift through human-curated content. The shift away from the customary 10 link search result archetype is the next big step for Blekko.”
Blekko says its user base is up to 12.5 million, with 5 million searches a day.
Alternative search engine Blekko announced the launch of a major site redesign today. The design leverages the API the company built for its mobile app izik, and breaks search results down into categories, offering curated results from “verified” sources of content. Search results pages also now include more results per page.
“Blekko’s new search results page will move away from the standard search result status-quo and introduce a remodeled homepage with an innovative new way to display results,” a spokesperson tells WebProNews. ” This new design will break down the spam-free search results into categories that will make it easier than ever for users to sift through human-curated content. The shift away from the customary 10 link search result archetype is the next big step for Blekko.”
The new site features responsive design, and has more images.
“It’s a great testament to our team that we’ve reached a usage level that almost no other search startup has managed to achieve in the past decade,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko. “And now we’re ready to take things to the next level by radically redefining the search results page. Now every search is going to instantly return results from the best sources on the Web and break them down into categories to provide a richer, more accurate list of real information, not just links.”
Blekko says its user base is up to 12.5 million, with 5 million searches a day.
Last week, Blekko launched a new search app for tablets called izik (pronounced EYE-zik), and apparently it’s received a decent amount of buzz for its debut. The app debuted as the top free reference app on iTunes.
The company says in a blog post, We launched izik, our search app for tablets, last Friday and are amazed at the responses we’ve received! Thanks to our users, on day one izik was the #1 free reference app on iTunes and #49 free app overall…We are delighted that there is such a strong desire to see something fresh and new in search, and that our vision with izik is so well received.”
“The twitterverse has been especially active in spreading the word about izik,” the company adds. “We’ve seen a lot of comments about the beautiful design and interface, the useful categories, and most importantly the high quality results that make izik a truly viable choice for searching on tablets.”
If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, take a look:
Blekko announced that it has launched a new search app for tablets called izik (pronounced EYE-zik). The company says it was built specifically with the iPad and Android tablets in mind.
“Tablets are increasingly getting integrated into our lives, so we wracked our noggins to figure out how we could use our search technology to optimally serve tablet users,” the company says in a blog post. “Not surprisingly, our research revealed that tablets take on a very different role in our lives than laptops and desktops. Laptops are for work; tablets are for fun. Laptops are task-oriented (‘what’s the capital of Bulgaria?’); tablets are more exploratory (‘what’s Jennifer Lopez doing these days?).”
“So, our goal with izik was to move the task-oriented search product we all use on our computers (aka 10 blue links) and turn it into a more fun, tablet-appropriate product,” says blekko. “That means an image-rich layout with an appearance and experience very different than what we’re used to seeing on a laptop.”
The app makes use of tablet gestures, of course. You can swipe horizontally to view results within categories, swipe vertically on the page to find more categories, expand results to see more without leaving the page, swipe through expanded results and pages, and pinch to share on Facebook and Twitter.
Alternative search engine blekko announced today that it is “donating” 22 billion pages’ metadata to Common Crawl, a non-profit foundation, which maintains an open crawl of the web for access and analysis by anyone who cares.
“The holiday season is in full swing and blekko is getting into the giving spirit – donating metadata on search engine ranking for 140 million websites and 22 billion webpages to Common Crawl,” a spokesperson for blekko tells WebProNews.
“With this donation of spam-filtered metadata, blekko is helping Common Crawl ensure that their resources and man-hours are spent crawling real, useful webpages,” he adds.
Blekko says that web and search being open and transparent is “number one on the blekko bill of rights.” Yes, blekko has a bill of rights:
Through blekko’s API, blekko says Common Crawl will have access to the metadata from 140 million websites.
Blekko announced the launch of a new suite of premium SEO tools today. The suite features a re-designed user interface, and a number of new features.
The suite includes page analysis, SEO report cards, inbound links organized by categories, Blekko crawler sections reports and domain reports, instant SEO data and direct SEO access from Blekko’s search engine, AdSense and IP hosting information, a full list of pages crawled, and PageSource and Cache.
It also includes full link reports of the following types: inbound links by host, live inbound links, all inbound links from a host, all inbound links to a specific URL, outbound links fro a page URL, internal links, and domain comparison of inbound links.
“The mission behind blekko has always be to offer full transparency on the web,” said Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. “Blekko’s premium SEO tools gives developers unique and often privately kept data about web domain content. Unlike other search engine analytic tools which only show general data oninbound links, our premium SEO tools provide full data reports that can be used to compare SEO stats between sites and direct SEO access from blekko search result pages.”
Blekko says it is able to provide its “up-to-the-minute” SEO tools because it is only one of four companies that can index the entire web. Blekko performs 120 million searches per month through 20 billion pages indexed. Over a hundred million of these are updated daily, Blekko says.
Blekko just announced a new social site called ROCKZi. The company is describing it as a “curated social platform that brings communities of likeminded people together to discuss and comment” on news and information.
“Unlike other search sites that force social features to the search interface, blekko has created a new standalone social environment that enables the masses to curate content on the web,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews.
It does, however, utilize “search assets,” the company says, to let users engage with content. In fact, the site will provide social signals to the blekko search engine at some point. The company says it can use the signals to identify the highest quality content, and curate search results, while “pushing spam to the bottom”.
The site has a “news boards” concept for categories like sports, politics, fashion, tech, recipes, etc. Stories are voted up, and whatnot. A familiar concept, for sure. Here’s what it looks like:
“ROCKZi’s great content, its state of the art design, and its very intuitive, low touch set of tools, creates a social platform that brings curation to the masses,” says blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. “Everyone reading content from anywhere in the web can now also be curating it.”
It will be interesting to see what kind of user adoption ROCKZi is able to put together. Blekko says it had 5.5 million unique visitors to its search engine in May. These people made over 110 million searches.
Alternative search engine blekko announced today that it has integrated new crawl technology to power its search index, and is now claiming to offer more comprehensive, real time updates to its SEO pages. This, a representative for the company tells WebProNews, is “transparent data that no other search engine offers for free.”
“Blekko is now one of only a handful of search companies that has more than 4 billion pages indexed and crawls more than 100 million pages daily, with top sites being indexed hourly,” the representative says.
Blekko shared the following graphic with us:
“When it comes to pages crawled, the sweet spot for blekko is a little more than 4 billion pages and we update at least 100 million pages each day,” says blekko’s director of engineering, Robert Saliba. “As soon as our crawler, Scoutjet, crawls a webpage, users have access to information about it through blekko’s SEO product. We want to allow people to see the Internet the way a search engine sees it, especially what the rest of the internet is saying about an url.”
“Scoutjet updates the top ranked starting pages on the Internet around every hour, while other high quality pages are checked at least every week,” he explains. “The continuous updates to blekko’s SEO data include page content, meta data, duplicate text, and inbound link counts. Since staying up-to-date is as much about forgetting the old as finding the new, inbound links that are no longer live and duplicate content that is no longer available disappear.”
Saliba says blekko is bringing more machines into the service, since traffic continues to “grow rapidly”.
Blekko says it is is getting over 5.5 million unique monthly visitors (a 500% increase over the beginning of the year) and over 100 million queries per month.
Blekko sought out from the start to become the “third search engine” behind Google and Bing (Yahoo, for all intents and purposes counted as Bing, since Bing powers Yahoo Search). Google and Bing serve search ads to monetize their efforts.
Now, the “third search engine” is testing ads, according to a report from MediaPost. These ads, however, are coming from Google and Bing – AdSense and Microsoft’s counterpart. Laurie Sullivan reports:
Visitors who visit the search engine, however, probably will not see a search ad based on their query. Few are linked to slashtags, which helps to curate content, according to Rich Skrenta, Blekko founder and CEO.
“We’re still ironing out the kinks,” Skrenta said. The company will measure success based on RPMs — page revenue per 1000 ad units.
Meanwhile, Blekko’s peer (in terms of alternative search engines), DuckDuckGo, announced that it saw over a million searches in one day for the first time. (hat tip: SearchEngineLand)
Blekko announced an update to the search index, a site re-design and the addition of automated slashtags to over 500 categories.
“That means users will get the benefit of curated search results (i.e. no spam!) for over 500 search categories, regardless of whether or not they manually append a slashtag to their query,” Blekko says in a blog post.
“As we head into 2012, our mission at blekko is more important than ever,” Blekko says. “If you think about it, prior to the internet the newspaper was the offline equivalent of the search engine. It was the starting spot where people went to get their news, job listings, personals, movies listings, classifieds, etc. Competing editorial voices were a hallmark of competition in the newspaper business and readers benefited because they had choice.”
They point to searches for “how to clean gutters” and “good table manners” to show off their new indexing.
Then, they suggest trying out their 3 Engine Monte tool, which lets you compare results with Bing and Google.
Blekko says it purposefully biases its index away from sites with low quality content, and that it’s source-based rather than link-based. “We purposefully bias our index away from sites with low quality content. “Regardless of how many people link to healthspamsite.com, we believe sites like the Mayo Clinic, NIH.gov, etc. are better sites. On blekko, brands trump links,” Blekko says.
Blekko secured a $30 million round of funding in September, which CEO Rich Skrenta told WebProNews the company would be used to expand and grow the service through hiring, infrastructure ,marketing, etc.
Blekko has secured a new $30 million investment from a mix of investors (some old, some new), including Russian search engine Yandex. CEO Rich Skrenta tells WebProNews, “Money will be used to expand and grow the service – hiring, infrastructure, marketing, etc.”
When asked if Blekko intends to expand into areas beyond search, he simply said, “We are focused on delivering great, spam-free search results.”
Earlier this month, Blekko did launch an analytics tool called Web Grepper.
Skrenta said that he wanted Blekko to be the “third” search engine (along with Google and Bing) back when it launched. I don’t know that it’s very widely considered that yet, but the investment can’t hurt the company’s quest to get there, especially if they will indeed remained focused on search.
Of course, Yahoo might have something to say about that “third search engine” thing. While it does use Bing to power its back-end, the company has been very vocal about how seriously it still takes search. Last week, they said they’re ready for a “search fight”. I don’t think Blekko was their main concern though.
There have been a whole lot of announcements from the major search engines this week, that all webmasters should be aware of – especially from Google, because while its market share may have slipped slightly (while Bing-powered search has grown a bit), it’s still by far the most used search engine.
While not exactly an announcement, Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts did post a video discussing reasons why Google Toolbar PageRank would drop. We talked about this a little bit more here, but you can hear exactly what he had to say in this video:
There is a part in there where he mentions that if you were caught selling links, but have stopped and want to earn Google’s trust back, you should submit a reconsideration request. On that note, Google announced that it is getting “more transparent” with its reconsideration requests.
Better Communication
“Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request,” explain Tiffany Oberoi and Michael Wyszomierski of Google’s Search Quality team in a joint blog post. “Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.”
“If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well,” they add. “Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it.”
Google says it’s not able to reply to individual requests with specific feedback, but that now webmasters will be able to find out if their site has been affected by a manual action and will know the outcome of the reconsideration review.
Google Using Blocked Site Data in Algorithm
Earlier this year, Google announced some new domain blocking features, which included a browser extension, and a link next to search results, which allow users to block sites that they don’t like. This was part of Google’s big quality clean up initiative, which also includes the Panda update and the +1 button. Initially, the sites blocked were on a personalized basis, but that is no longer completely the case. Google search quality engineer Johannes Henkel is quoted as saying, “We’ve also started incorporating data about sites people have blocked into our general search ranking algorithms to help users find more high quality sites.”
Pagination and View-All in Search Results
Google is “making a larger effort” to return single-page versions of content in search results, when the content is broken up among multiple pages. Think multiple page articles and content slideshows. Google says users tend to prefer single page versions of content, but sometimes these can load slowly, so there are also times when the multiple pages work better.
“So while a view-all page is commonly desired, as a webmaster it’s important to balance this preference with the page’s load time and overall user experience,” Google indexing team software engineers Benjia Li & Joachim Kupke say in a joint blog post on the Webmaster Central blog.
You can read more about the technical specs here. They summarize it all nicely: “Because users generally prefer the view-all option in search results, we’re making more of an effort to properly detect and serve this version to searchers. If you have a series of content, there’s nothing more you need to do.”
To better optimize your view-all page, you can use rel=”canonical” from component pages to the single-page version; otherwise, if a view-all page doesn’t provide a good user experience for your site, you can use the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes as a strong hint for Google to identify the series of pages and still surface a component page in results.
They talk even more about the specs of using rel=”next” and rel=”rev” in this post.
Rich Snippets for Apps
Google is also showing rich snippets for apps in search results now. They’re getting info for these from various places including: Android Market, Apple iTunes and CNET.
“Before you install a software application, you may want to check out what others think about it and how much it costs,” says product manager Alejandro Goyen. “Starting today, you’ll be able to get information about the applications, including review and price information, right in your search results.”
That’s something to consider if your business has an app. It’s a reputation factor.
Editing in YouTube
This isn’t exactly a search feature, but when you consider how big a role video can play in search marketing and that YouTube is the second largest search engine, it’s certainly worth your attention. YouTube has launched new editing tools that allow you to easy edit videos right from YouTube itself.
This should help you improve your videos, which are not only searchable on the second largest search engine and embeddable across the web, but often appear right in the results of regular Google searches. This new editing functionality will make it easier to try new things with less successful videos and potentially make them more viral.
Bing Adaptive Search
Ok, getting away from Google, Bing has launched adaptive search, which is essentially its version of personalized search. The company says it “helps decipher the intent and context of each search you conduct based on your search history.”
“The concept of personalized search is not a new idea, but Bing continues to focus on it and drive progress as the search space evolves,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. “In fact, Bing views personalized search as less of a ‘feature’ and more of what to expect from search.” “Ultimately, the goal is to reduce ambiguity and help people find what they’re looking for more quickly,” he adds. “The personalization can be pretty subtle to the naked eye, but the more Bing learns about your intent the more personal it will become. And Bing also wants to be sure a diverse set of results still show up so people aren’t locked in a ‘filter bubble’. We think this provides a good balance.”
You’ve been dealing with this kind of thing with Google for quite some time, but it does throw in another SEO factor to consider for Bing, which as previously mentioned continues to gain market share.
WebProNews is interviewing Bing’s Stefan Weitz as I write this, so check back at WebProNews for more on this soon.
“The Web Grepper searches for unique data information and trends that are embedded in code and cannot be found on any other search engine,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “For example, you could search to see how many pages request your user information when you visit, the types of targeting information the site collecting, or how many sites have ‘Like’ vs ‘+1′ buttons, etc.”
Users can submit questions to the tool and the Blekko community votes on a daily basis on which questions will be analyzed.
These aren’t the only things going on in search this week, but these are some of the more noteworthy things that are likely to have a bigger impact on most site owners, than say things like Flight Search and Baseball scores.
Blekko announced the launch of a new search analytics tool Web Grepper.
“The Web Grepper searches for unique data information and trends that are embedded in code and cannot be found on any other search engine,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “For example, you could search to see how many pages request your user information when you visit, the types of targeting information the site collecting, or how many sites have ‘Like’ vs ‘+1’ buttons, etc.”
CEO Rich Skrenta says, “With Web Grepper, we’re offering our users unique access to the blekko index and embedded information that cannot be found on other search engines. “This allows users to uncover incredibly useful data that was previously inaccessible through a keyword search.”
Users can submit questions to the tool and the Blekko community votes on a daily basis on which questions will be analyzed.
This is an extension of the whole community-driven philosophy behind Blekko – and ultimately search in general. See Blekko’s slashtags.
The results will be displayed in a report.
Blekko says it will make sure it’s not being used as a hacking tool to get personal info by manually reviewing “greps” and monitoring malicious data mining behavior.
Blekko announced today that it has teamed up with Foodily on recipe search. Foodily, a social recipe network, will curate Blekko’s search results for recipes, which the company calls “a cluttered and spam rich environment on most search engines”.
“Search has always been a personal experience but the escalating amount of spam on the Web is driving search to become social, where communities and groups of friends can help call out the best of results,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of blekko. “Foodily’s trusted community of cooks and food lovers will be a tremendous resource to blekko searchers.”
We talked to Skrenta last week about Blekko’s Zorro update, search quality, and filtering. The search engine is now integrating hundreds of its “slashtags” into search results. These are at the root of the human curation element of Blekko.
“Foodily’s mission is to help everyone find the food they want and love, and share it with their social circle. We’re excited to play a role in helping blekko searchers find great resources on food, cooking and recipes,” said Andrea Cutright, CEO of Foodily. “The Foodily community is rising to the challenge of bringing the best recipe content to the top, so we can all enjoy quickly finding that next great meal.”
ChaCha says it has “increased its accuracy and database of information” by adding computational knowledge from Wolfram Alpha. “This partnership means Wolfram Alpha will allow ChaCha users to access computed facts that cover over 100 topics,” a representative tells WebProNews. “This is in addition to ChaCha’s “ask-a-smart-friend” database that has already answered over one billion questions.”
In the partnership’s first day, Wolfram Alpha answered 32,000 of ChaCha’s incoming questions, ChaCha says.
Blekko, the alternative search engine that aims to challenge Google and Bing by reducing spam and low quality content in search results via human curation, has refreshed its index and results pages in an update it refers to as “Zorro”. We picked CEO Rich Skrenta’s brain about the update, search quality, and blekko’s goals in general.
“Zorro is a major upgrade in our relevance,” Skrenta tells WebProNews. “blekko users have spent the past six months curating the web on category by category basis, telling us the best sites for broad categories like health and personal finance as well as narrower categories like gluten free.”
“Zorro incorporates those human-curation efforts into our result set for non-slashtag queries by boosting pages from the curated sites – even for non-slashtag queries,” he adds. “With Zorro, we can boost results from multiple slashtags to make results better. ex.: https://blekko.com/ws/pregnancy+tips”
“The net result is further reduction of spam,” he says.
On how the Zorro update improves the search experience compared to competitors, Skrenta tells us, “Other search sites rely wholly on algorithmic intelligence for results. We are incorporating human-curation efforts directly into our results. Given the amount of SEO gaming being done, we believe that only humans can accurately differentiate a clever spam site from a quality site.”
“We initially integrated slashtags for 10 sites into our standard results,” he says. “Now we are incorporating hundreds. Our users have created over 100k slashtags since we launched. That data wasn’t available on day 1.”
Blekko’s mission is to provide search results without spam. That takes a lot of filtering. There is a discussion going on around the web right now about how what we see on the web is becoming more and more filtered. Eli Pariser calls it the “Filter Bubble,” and DuckDuckGo, another alternative search engine and peer of blekko’s launched a site discussing this very topic. This is more about search engines and other sites (including social networks like Facebook) filtering what we see by tailoring content delivered to us on a personalized level. A lot of people don’t like the idea of having this content filtered. With blekko doing its own kind of filtering, we wondered what Skrenta might have to say about this.
“We’ve reached a tipping point on the web where it is easier to white list the set of good sites than black-list the set of bad sites,” he tells us. “ex. the top 100 health sites will answer all your health questions. You don’t want to search outside that set of sites. Our efforts with Zorro combine the best of curation and algorithmic intelligence to deliver spam free results.”
Blekko somewhat famously (at least within the search industry) blocked a number of sites deemed “content farms” from its results. Even today, blekko’s home page carries the message: “Slashing out…spam…content farms…malware.” Among the sites blocked were a few from Demand Media, including eHow, which has consistently carried the “content farm” label, despite the company’s best efforts to position it in a different light.
Demand Media has made it a point to clean up eHow’s quality (more on this initiative here), so we wondered if blekko’s banning of eHow, or any site, can be reversed. “We constantly review sites for quality and our users continually identify quality sites for us,” Skrenta says.
Along with the Zorro update, blekko launched a little game called “3 Engine Monte“. It’s available via a link on blekko’s home page, and invites users to enter a query and then choose from a set of three results sets, which one they like the best. One is from Google, one is from Bing, and the other is of course from blekko.
We asked if the majority are picking blekko most often. “We are currently collecting data and will have results soon,” Skrenta tells us.
When asked about long-term goals for blekko, Skrenta simply says, “Clean up the web from spam, category by category.”
Alternative search engine Blekko has launched a major update, called “Zorro,” which includes an expanded search index with integration of the slashtags, which have been the staple of the site.
On the new results pages, users will see sites that others have hand-picked to be included in one or more slashtags. So far, users have created over 100,000 of them. The company considers this a human site review element to the “war on spam.” The slashtags appear at the top of the search results, and for each site boosted by the slashtag, next to its URL.
“Millions of users and hundreds of millions of searches have given us insight into what is truly great quality content on the Web and what is poor quality spam,” said Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. “This new version of blekko bakes in that intelligence in every search so the spam gets weeded out and the best content comes to the top in every search.”
In addition to that, search results will display sites’ logos. Blekko says this is so users can “quickly choose results from trusted brands that offer the best content.”
Though stumbling a bit in some months, Blekko has continued to grow since its launch. Compete has Blekko.com at 211k unique visitors in the U.S. last month, after launching last fall.
Finally, the Zorro update comes with a “new relevance model for ranking.” This includes “a ramped up adspam algorithm, identifying millions more pages on the Web that contain multiple ads and little content.” Such pages, Blekko says, have been permanently elminated from the index so they’ll never appear in search results.
Blekko is so confident in its search quality, it has also introduced a little game called 3 Engine Monte, which lets you enter a query and see three different sets of results. One comes from Blekko, and the others from Google and Bing. The user’s job is to pick which one they like best, and they think users are apt to pick Blekko fairly frequently, I’m assuming.
3 Engine Monte doesn’t appear to take into account various kinds of search results offered in the other engines through Universal search. For example, if I search for “mexican food” it doesn’t show me all of the local stuff and the images that Google actually shows me if I go to Google and perform the search. As far as the purse “ten blue links” type results, I’ll give Blekko credit for offering better ones (and Bing as well for that matter) in some instances that I tried.
Interestingly, it does show you which results in the competitors’ results that it has banned. The game can be accessed from the home page of Blekko.
Blekko announced today that it is now powering RSS search for the popular iPad app Flipboard. The functionality is designed to weed out spam as blekko’s slashtag method of searching does, so Flipboard users can discover good content based on keywords.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity to partner with a great brand and an outstanding product that delivers such an awesome experience for its readers,” commented blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. “We hope we can make the experience even better by pointing Flipboard readers to the absolute best sources of content via RSS feeds on any topic, without spam.”
“Flipboard’s goal is to bring everything that you care about together into one place,” says Flipboard co-founder Evan Doll. “By adding blekko’s RSS search to Flipboard, you can now also find your favorite RSS feeds and enjoy them in a beautiful visual format within your social magazine.”
Partnerships with other widely used sites and apps could be just what blekko needs to really gain some exposure and ground in the search space. It will be interesting to see what other companies partner with blekko going forward.
Even Google’s Matt Cutts is encouraging users to check the search engine out, saying that the competition helps keep Google on its toes. I don’t think Google is really on its toes too much because of blekko at this point (Bing might be a slightly different story), but blekko has only been around for a little more than half a year.
Google’s Matt Cutts used a new webmaster video to share his thoughts about alternative search engines Blekko and DuckDuckGo. Long story short, he thinks you should check them out, and see what you like and don’t like about them.
The discussion was spurred by a question submitted to him, asking what he thinks about Blekko. “In general, I love when new search engines launch,” he says. “It’s always cool to run a few queries, and see how do they score things differently than we would score things.”
“I think it’s fantastic to have a lot of competition,” he says. “I think it’s good for users, as long as people are competing on a level or fair playing ground.”
I can hear the critics of Google’s own competitive practices getting ready to chime in already.
On Blekko’s slashtag strategy, Cutts says, “It’s unclear it will catch on, because it is some amount of work to build those individual restricts or groups or collections, but they do a relatively good job of showing auto complete, and sort of suggesting tags you might want to add.”
“I love when new search engines launch. I think competition is great,” he reiterates. “It keeps us on our toes. It makes sure that we’re doing the right things. I highly encourage people to check out both Blekko and DuckDuckGo. See what you like, see what you don’t like. Certainly with power users, it will certainly have some amount of appeal, and then time will tell.”
“The wonderful thing is that everyone has different philosophies about how to improve search, and how to make search better,” he adds. “So this is another company trying out their idea – their philosophy, and we’ll just see how well it works.”
Below are a couple of interviews we did earlier this year with Blekko co-founder and CEO Rich Skrenta and DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg about their search engines. They give you an idea of their search philosophies:
