Blekko Search Engine – An Overview

blekko is a web search engine that aims at providing better search results by offering results culled from a set of 3 billion trusted websites and excluding material from such sites as content farms. blekko is a better way to search the web by using slashtags. blekko uses  ScoutJet as its Web crawler. The site, launched to the public on November 1, 2010, uses slashtags to provide results for common searches.

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Slashtag search lets users slash in what they want and slash out what they don’t. Knock out the spam sites and search only the sites you want to search. blekko have created hundreds of slashtags for you to try out and use. create a slashtag. Users can create slahtag after logged into blekko. Click on the “create a slashtag” link in your left-hand column.

Creating Slashtags

• Enter your slashtag name – Enter the slashtag name you wish to use in this box. The name’s color will remain blue as you enter it if the slashtag name is available. If the name turns red, slashtag name is unavailable
• Enter a description for your slashtag – Describe your slashtag. For example, my favorite sports sites
• Add websites to your slashtag – several categories worth of websites have been included as optional suggestions to help you build your slashtag. You can mark the box next to any or all of these URLs to include them in your slashtag
• Add your own websites and slashtags – Enter the URLs of the websites you’d like to include in your slashtag in this box. Separate the URLs by spaces or put them on separate lines to ensure they are loaded correctly
• Search for slashtags to add – You can search for slashtags to add to your own slashtag by clicking on this link
• Private slashtag – If you want your slashtag to be visible and searchable by you only, choose the option to “make this slashtag private.” To make this slashtag public, you will need to delete the slashtag and recreate it as a public slashtag.

Any slashtag you create is immediately searchable after its creation. Just add the slashtag to your query. Here are some examples:

• avoiding swine flu /health – searches only health sites
• tiger woods /gossip – searches only gossip sites
• oil spill /conservative – searches only conservative sites
• obama /liberal – searches only liberal web sites

Next to the slashtag names there are subscribe icon(rss feed), follow icon, embed icon and like icon.

Topic Slashtags – Topic slashtags are slashtags created by blekko for everyone to use. They are denoted by the full name /blekko/slashtag. These are topics that cover a wide variety of interests and can help provide a starting point for you to create your own slashtags. Currently, only admins can edit and create these slashtags. /techblgs, /android, /dictionary, etc are topic Slashtags

Built-in Slashtags – Built in Slashtags are slashtags that perform special functions or act as shortcuts. For example:

• oil spill /date – adding /date to your query will bring in the most recent results and sort them by time;
• serendipity /define – /define will return the definition of any word in the dictionary;
• http://www.techcrunch.com /seo – searching on a URL and adding /seo will bring up detailed seo data for that website;
• /profile – typing /profile will bring up your own profile page.

API Slashtags – Blekko have included a number of slashtags that draw on third party apis to help filter your search results. Some examples are:

• /amazon – see specific results from Amazon for your search query.
• /shop – compare prices for items you are looking to buy.
• /twitter – get real-time results from twitter.com
• /youtube – see videos from youtube.com

Blekko displays  lot of information about individual web pages and sites which it collected during crawling and indexing the web. The buttons you find in the second line of the search results are the ways to access that information. Each of the buttons can also be accessed by their slashtag name as well.

• tag – click on this to add this result to an existing slashtag
• seo – see detailed SEO information for this URL
• links – shows inbound links for this URL
• cache – see a cached version of the page with search words highlighted
• spam – remove this site from your search results and add it to your /spam slashtag

In blekko users have the choice between seeing search results ordered by relevance or by date. The default choice is /relevance. If you choose /date, the results will be ordered by keyword match with the most recent results shown first, and no relevance weighting given to your query terms.

You can download the blekko toolbar here [source]