Introducing Blekko, the Self-curated Search Engine

This guest post is by Philip Rudy of ImageWorks Studio.

Have you used Blekko yet? It’s the search engine that prides itself on human curation. You as the user can actually tailor your own personal search results, which begs the question: does Blekko have some type of insight into blending “search & social?”

Potential is an ugly word, and I hate to use it here, but Blekko really has so much potential. Only time will tell if the team is able to get the combination of social and search perfectly right and stay in the game. After all, “human curation” sounds kind of hard.

Maybe not, though. Human curation has already helped Blekko completely block out the top 20 sites voted as spam by human users— these are all mainly content farms (sorry eHow). Anyone can join this cause by setting up a user site on Blekko and marking a site as spam.

The power behind slashtags

Blekko separates itself from other search engines by making use of the “/” tag—the slashtag as a search tool.

You can either create your own slashtag or used a built-in one like the /date slashtag (which also happens to be an extremely helpful slashtag).

All you have to do is type in a search query, like “sports /date” and your query results will automatically be sorted by date, from the most recent results.

Other slashtags do different things. One that’s extremely useful (especially now that Yahoo Site Explorer is down) is the “/seo” slashtag. This allows you to see your sites duplicate content, all of your inbound and outbound links, and much, much more. Try it right now. Enter your site domain name, add a space and “/seo” and you will get something like this:

Creating your own slashtags

All this being said, Google still beats Blekko—even with its awesome concept of human curation of the web and slashtag operators —mainly because, well, slashtags are kind of exhausting. First of all you have to familiarize yourself with all of them, then you have to remember them, and then you have to type them in, and so on. A simple Google search seems to be a better option at this point in time.

But creating your own personal slashtag is a whole other story. Using slashtags, you can basically create your own search engine for any topic you like.

For example, I recently created a “/guestpost” slashtag that returns all the websites I have ever written for. It’s very cool, and very useful. If you use the search field below, you will find websites’ “write for us” pages, which is very useful for guest posters and people looking to build their brand and audience.

The point is that this type of interface usability leaves the door open for a lot of innovation. Used wisely, creating slashtags (which can be done with the help of co-editors) could prove to be a valuable SEO and blogging tool. The ability to tailor and customize your own search engine results packs a lot of power, and if you spend a little time browsing your whole site and coming up with ideas, you can find yourself becoming very, very creative. Just ask the community over at stackoverflow.com, which helps Blekko tailor many of its “programming” slashtags.

Another cool thing about Blekko is that it provides the ability to create your profile, which will list any slashtags that you have created. You are also able to include your Twitter profile, your website, a little information about yourself, and a few other things. It’s the absolute bare minimum of the social package, but it is sort of intriguing. Here’s why.

The ability to basically sculpt your own search engines by creating slash tags, and the ability to post on the walls of the slashtags of other users, opens up some interesting social avenues that aren’t quite built up the “appropriate” way yet. I put the word “appropriate” in quotation marks because I am not quite sure that “social plus search” is the route that Blekko seems to want to take yet—or ever. Right now, their main focus seems to be human curation and the elimination of low-quality content from their SERPs, which is definitely a great cause, but I think there is room there to figure out how to do it socially.

Right now, on Blekko, there is a small, yet highly intriguing ability to search through users and the different slashtags that they’re editing. I’m guessing that not all the users that are on Blekko are listed there, but all you have to do to browse through different Blekko users is type “/users” into the search bar (there are multiple shortcut slashtags that you can check out).

What if Blekko were to leverage their slashtags in a way that connects users that were creating their own slashtags? A step toward this scenario is the creation of the “/likes” slashtag, which shows all of your Facebook likes and all of your friends’ Facebook likes (if you log in with Facebook).

By the same token, isn’t curating your slashtags pretty much almost doing the same thing, except compartmentalizing the different aspects of your life? For instance a slashtag could be created for work references, for going out, or for finding out about the world.

Blekko’s next big step could very well be figuring out the key to combining search with social. However that is also everyone else’s goal, and living in a world of what if’s is never a good idea. Right now, Blekko stands as a very unique search engine with a very bright future. Give it a try and let us know what you think of it—and whether you’ll keep using it—in the comments.

This article was written by Philip Rudy of ImageWorks Studio – a Custom Web Design company based in the Washington DC area founded in 1995.