Blekko the search engine start-up by Greg Lindahl and Rich Skrenta just entered beta and we got our hands on an invite! We’ve had a couple of days to play with it and we are definitely impressed so far!
Blekko obviously isn’t going to be able to compete with the likes of Google right off the bat, however they’ve got a couple little tricks up their sleeves both to interest casual users (slash tags) and webmasters (some fancy SEO features). They seem to focused on a simple to customise and highly open search experience, and although it might sound a bit strange it works surprisingly well.
Standard Search Functionality
You can’t really call a search engine a search engine if it doesn’t offer any kind of search functionality and Blekko for the first private beta isn’t doing too badly at all!
Slash Tags – User Customisable Search
Custom slash tag
Blekko’s primary feature – Slash tags allow users to filter their search results based on a user-defined or Blekko defined list of websites. This is much like a Google Co-Op search engine, except much simpler to create and built directly into the search engines core. After creating a slash tag you can run a search against them by typing the slash tag followed by your search query, the format is: “/<your-username>/<your-tag-name> <search>”.
Fully Open Search Engine
Blekko /rank slash tag allows you to find out what is driving the ranking for a URL.
Blekko couldn’t be called a search engine if it didn’t offer a search experience, which it does and not too badly either. What is more interesting for SEO’s though; Blekko is very open even down to the point of going into great detail why a website is ranking how it is in the results. By adding the slash tag “/rank” to the end of your search query Blekko will reveal all! A picture says a thousand words they say, and in this case it really does…
The full details upon a /rank query
As you can see there is a lot of details they let you in on, much of it can be deduced by yourself but there is the odd check mark that is a little vague and I would expect to see some clarification in their help sections in the weeks before they go live.
SEO Features
Blekko offers a ton of different information about websites and offers up some interesting tables and graphs to help visualise and analyse a websites on-page and off-page SEO.
Again pictures can say this better than words:
The different countries linking to a URL
Anchor text ratio's are available which shows the number of times a particular anchor is used in a websites backlinks.
Shows the pages external links ordered by Blekko's ranking algorithm - shows your best backlinks.
The "Sections" tab, it seems to break the website into "SEO Sections" the red example shows as "excluded" and the blue one as "included" - no real information about this yet.
Compare one website with up to 3 others comparing all sorts of different linking and ranking metrics.
As well as the above Blekko also offers:
- As above backlinks but for a whole domain (think Yahoo! linkdomain: operator but ordered by the best backlinks first)
- Website Source – This appears to simply be highlighted source code when they last crawled the website
- Duplicated Content – Shows you other websites that are copying your content, or if you are that way inclined websites content that you are copying
Problems Currently
- Multiple Listings in the SERPs for one base domain – For example wikipedia has 3 listings for the search “SEO”, not what you’d expect to find for an extremely competitive search term – this is due to excessive domain authority.
- International Listings in SERPs – Currently Blekko does not filter out non-english results from its listings, there is of course more than one language in use today but it is easy enough to detect browser language and filter based on that or even have a separate (sub)domain for other countries as Google does.
- Small index size – While its not tiny, its far from large and Blekko will need to start indexing far more content if they expect to compete with some of the bigger engines – or even with some of the current SEO tools available online, all require a large index to be of use.
- No API, yet – Its early days but an open API will set this search engine apart from its competitors and give webmasters a compelling reason to use and keep using the service.
I am truly impressed with Blekko so far, it has piles of potential but just isn’t quite there – yet. Blekko give us an API and a fresher, bigger index and you’ve got a winner on your hands.
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Blekko is definitely a cool new search engine. The slash tag feature is unique and gives it an edge that people will be interested in. However, I do not think it will ever reach the popularity of Google due to it’s complicated nature. I think Google’s greatest strengths is it’s simplicity; it’s so easy anyone can use it to it’s full potential. Blekko is not like that.
Coming from someone who doesn’t have a lot of time on her hands, having to learn how to use a search engine does not appeal to me when I have Google available. Of course I took the time to learn about Blekko, but I’m in the industry. I don’t think the average person will want to do that.
I’ve done some research and I think the best new search engine is Bweezy. Similar name, but very different from Blekko. Bweezy offers Google results, which I love. It also lets you open search results in the same window as the search, which eliminates the need to open a ton of tabs! I’d check it out if you’re into new search engines.