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 is a better way to search the web by using slashtags. slashtags search only the sites you want and cut out the spam sites. use friends, experts, community or your own slashtags to slash in what you want and slash out what you don't.
But promise isn’t always reality, of course. It’s fairly easy to do slashtag searches on Blekko that don’t do better than Google.
What’s immediately clear from conducting a lot of searches on both Blekko and Google in a concentrated period of time is that the upstart has built a credible search engine that people can use today with a good success. (For a general overview see Blekko, The “Slashtag” Search Engine, Goes Live.) However in a head-to-head comparison I found that — today — Google is generally better in ways that matter to mainstream users.
There are also secondary features on Google that are highly useful and don’t appear on Blekko. For example, sitelinks and universal search have become staples of the search-user experience. And Google’s more “visually rich” presentation of certain categories of results (e.g., local) is often superior as well.
In cases where topical or time-based results are more important or relevant (“elections,” “world series”) Google also proved generally better. However the “/date” filter (slashtag) improved results dramatically on Blekko in those instances.
Src: searchengineland.com
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