Blekko: New Search Engine Lets You “Spin” The Web
Jul 28, 2010 at 12:00pm ET by Danny Sullivan
Did you think the search engine wars had devolved into a fight between only Google and Bing? Think again. New challenger Blekko is stepping into the fray, opening to limited beta testing today. It offers a compelling way to “slash the web” and put a particular spin on your search results.
Blekko isn’t a Google-killer. Nor is Blekko positioning itself that way. But Blekko’s “slashtags” are a unique feature that may draw you in on occasions when you want to see how search results look when they’re skewed to a particular viewpoint.
“We’re there for searches you can’t do elsewhere,” said Michael Markson, vice president of marketing for Blekko. “Every time you search the conservative web, we want to do that search. Or the green web, and so on.”
Slashtags: Spinning Your Search Results
What would rank number one for “honey” if you asked bakers versus beekeepers? Blekko can give you the spin from both groups. Want your search results with a liberal slant? You can do that at Blekko, or slash your results the opposite way for a conservative view.
This is all done using slashtags, special keywords that you place after what your searching for, in order to indicate the viewpoint you want used to spin your results. Blekko maintains over 250 slashtags (the full list, for those in the beta, is here), including viewpoints such as
•/beer
•/christianity
•/green
•/startrek
Slashtags In Action
Let’s see some slashtags in action. Want web sites discussing BP but with a liberal slant? Do this (note: the link and several others below only work for those in the beta):
bp /liberal
That’s a search for BP, as you might do on Google, followed by the slashtag indicating a liberal viewpoint: /liberal. It return back sites like the Huffington Post or Mother Jones: