blekko

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

The company was co-founded by Rich Skrenta in 2007, who had created Newhoo, which was ultimately acquired by Netscape and renamed as the Open Directory Project.[2] blekko has raised $24 million in venture capital from such individuals as Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway, as well as from U.S. Venture Partners and CMEA Capital.[3] The company's goal was to be able to provide useful search results without the extraneous links often provided by Google. Individuals who enter searches for such frequently searched categories as cars, finance, health and hotels will receive results prescreened by blekko editors who will use what The New York Times described as "Wikipedia-style policing" to weed out pages created by content farms and focus on results from professionals.[4] Use of slashtags will restrict the set of search results to those matching the specified characteristic and a slashtag will be automatically added for search categories with prescreened results.[5] Queries related to personal health are limited to a prescreened list of 76 sites that blekko editors have determined to be trustworthy, excluding many sites that rank highly in Google searches.[2] As of blekko's launch date, its 8,000 beta editors had developed 3,000 slashtags corresponding to the site's most frequent searches.[5] The company hopes to use editors to develop prepared lists of the 50 sites that best match its 100,000 most frequent search targets.[2] Additional tools built into blekko allow users to see the IP address that a website is running on and let registered users label a site as spam.[6]

Blekko plans to earn revenue by selling ads based on slashtags and search results. Blekko plans to provide data on its algorithm for ranking search results, including details for inbound links to specific sites.[4]

Blekko uses an initiative called slashtags[7], to allow ease of searching and categorise searches. There are many system slashtags and pre-defined slashtags, which are in place to allow users to start searching right away. /slashtags are able to be created by anyone on signup, to allow sorted searches and reduce spam. This idea was based on the following bill, thought up by the owner of blekko:

   1. Search shall be open
   2. Search results shall involve people
   3. Ranking data shall not be kept secret
   4. Web data shall be readily available
   5. There is no one-size-fits-all for search
   6. Advanced search shall be accessible
   7. Search engine tools shall be open to all
   8. Search & community go hand-in-hand
   9. Spam does not belong in search results
  10. Privacy of searchers shall not be violated


Here is a list of features readily available for all users to access:

    * SEO Statistics
    * Linking pages (in and out stats)
    * IP lookup
    * Cached pages
    * Tagging of pages
    * Creating and searching /slashtags
    * Finding duplicate content
    * Comparing sites
    * Crawl statistics
    * Page Count
    * Robots.txt location
    * Cohosted sites
    * Page latency
    * Page length