TechCrunch reports Blekko, the SlashTag search engine, has made the bold move of banning some "content farms" from their index completely. Rich Skrenta, Blekko's CEO confirmed the ban with us today. He told us Blekko has decided to ban the "top 20 spam sites from blekko's index entirely, based on our users click /spam on results." This includes ehow.com, one of Demand Media's top revenue generating web sites. Rich explained this came up after listening to Danny on This Week In Google. Rich hacked together a reverse slashtag named -/contentfarms that allowed searches to remove these si [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: SEO | Content Farms | SEO: Spamming

I'll expose my bias up front: I'm a fan of Blekko and its audacious project to make search better. Now the site that bought you the "spam clock," has launched mobile apps for the iPhone and Android. It's a logical and even necessary step for Blekko, given the strategic importance of mobile. Registered users can manage slashtags directly from the app, adding new sites for example. Users can also view "seo info" for sites as they can within Blekko on the web. I only played with it for a short while but quickly came to the conclusion that this is "version 1." It's not clear that Facebook Li [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Mobile | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines

Google: Go to the head of the class. Wikipedia: You stay after school for extra tutoring. That seems to be one of the conclusions you can draw from a fun blog post today by Wolfram|Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram. Writing about the Jeopardy battle between past champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and IBM's Watson computer (the computer won a dry run earlier this month), Wolfram decided to see how several search engines would fare when asked to answer Jeopardy clues. The results? Google scored highest in both having the answer show up anywhere on the first page of search results and ha [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Yandex | Wolfram Alpha | Yahoo: Search

Every hour, one million spam pages are created. That's a stat that start-up search engine Blekko has now put out -- complete with a new "Spam Clock" showing a count-up of spam pages created since the first of the year. Currently, the Spam Clock estimates that there's been about 155 million spam pages made since January 1. Blekko CEO Rick Skrenta talks more about the clock on his personal blog here. Don't confuse that figure with the total amount of spam pages on the web. That figure is probably in the billions. How Bad Is Spam? And Is It Killing Google? Is spam a big problem? Sure -- s [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Strategy | Features: Analysis | Stats: Relevancy | Top News

The news broke yesterday that Facebook was getting a whopping $500 million from Goldman Sachs and existing investor Digital Sky Technologies at a valuation of $50 billion. None of this has been confirmed by the company but it's being very widely reported. Apparently the Goldman investment will enable the company's most wealthy clients to "get in" before an IPO and virtually guarantee that Goldman is the firm (or the lead firm) that takes Facebook public when that eventually happens. Groupon also just raised a gigantic funding round, between $500 million and $950 million according to reports [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Business Issues | Blekko | Channel: Social | Facebook | Google: Web Search | Top News

Bing has received a good deal of coverage for its integration of Facebook Likes into search results. In its Bing Search Summit last week, Microsoft said that Likes will influence ranking and create more personalized search results over time. As Microsoft's Satya Nadella said, it's "search quality foundationally influenced by the social graph." Despite its ambitions, Microsoft is being somewhat cautious in its roll out so far. Many people, including me, have seen very limited integration and continue to have difficulty finding "Liked" results on Bing. By contrast, search startup Blekko is [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer | Features: Analysis | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Top News

It's not exactly a case of If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, because Blekko has insisted all along that it's not trying to beat Google or any other search engine. It is trying to beat web spam in search results, and that's what has fueled today's announcement that Blekko and DuckDuckGo -- another upstart search engine -- are partnering on search results. Users doing searches on Blekko will sometimes see "Zero-Click Info" from DuckDuckGo with background about individual websites, as shown here: The Zero-Click Info box can be seen by clicking the "info" link below a search result. M [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer | DuckDuckGo

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 sea [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer | Google: Web Search | Top News

The new search engine Blekko just launched, and it's making SEO-related data that it has found during its crawling and indexing of the web available for all sites. Just what does it include and how useful is it? Accessing SEO Data You can access SEO data for any domain or URL by clicking the SEO link below any page in search results. You can click link for a list of external links. The SEO tools include: a list of pages that link to the site link distribution and anchor text data crawl data pages indexed a site comparison tool a duplicate content report Blekko also ha [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: SEO | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | Top News

Blekko, the long anticipated search engine founded by Rich Skrenta, has finally opened to the public. The service offers an interesting way to "slash" or create specialty search engines for any topic, along with new features the company hopes will improve relevancy. My previous article, Blekko: New Search Engine Lets You "Spin" The Web, goes into great depth about the core features you'll find at Blekko today, so I'd encourage you to read through that. Below, I'll provide an update on a new features added since my review of Blekko was written in July, when the service opened to a small grou [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer | Top News

Perhaps appropriately Blekko will launch late Halloween/early Monday morning. Somewhat amazingly Blekko emerges as a credible alternative to the major search engines. With its power-user tools and transparency it will delight some people and no doubt mystify others. It offers a novel and pretty useful take on "social search." In the beginning it won't (and can't) replace Google or Bing or Yahoo but people may find themselves supplementing their usage of the major engines with Blekko in selected areas. Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta reminded me that Google was an annoying little ankle-biter (my [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer

Blekko is a stealth search engine which aims to change the search game by being fairly transparent with ranking data. Since they will start out with limited search marketshare, they aren't risking much in sharing data that other search engines have traditionally been rather secretive about. Further, they allow customization of results via what they call slashtags that allow you to create vertical search engines. The emphasis on openness helped make DMOZ a success, and if past performance is any indication of future performance, Blekko will be a success as well. They are currently in beta, s [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Blekko | Channel: SEO

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 isn't a Google-killer. Nor is Blekko positioning itself that way. But Blekko's "slashtags" are a unique feature that may draw you in on occasions when you want to see how search results look when they're skewed to a particular viewpoint. "We're there for searches you can't do elsewhere," said Mic [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer | Features: General | Top News

At the beginning of Google's "Searchology" event in early 2007 original Google employee Craig Silverstein opined, "If Google had started a year or two earlier, it wouldn't have worked." That's because prior to that time (1998) the internet wasn't yet large enough to require Google or enable people to see the value of its approach. As sites and pages multiplied exponentially Google became an increasingly necessary tool. We're all familiar with the story. Now Google controls a majority of search traffic in most countries around the world. It has become a seemingly unstoppable force. The in [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: Web Search | Search Engines: Cuil | Search Engines: Custom Search Engines | Search Engines: Open Directory Project | Search Engines: Powerset | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | Search Features: General | Top News

After covering search for 13 years, I'm more than a little jaded. I've seen any number of search start-ups promise to revolutionize how we search. None of them have in the huge way they've promised, other than Google -- and it's a special case. Over the past few weeks, I've been watching Wolfram Alpha walk the same hype path so many have followed before. So I thought I'd offer a little advice, for what it's worth. Here's how to set your search service up for a disappointing fall. 1) Fail to brief those in the know: First I heard of Wolfram Alpha was on Techmeme back in March. The com [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: SEO | Search Engines: Other Search Engines | Top News | Wolfram Alpha

Yesterday, Google joined Twitter with a company account. We twittered a few search engine-related addresses as part of our post about that, but we wanted to do one that was a little more organized. So welcome to our big search engine Twitter list! The list isn't complete, nor will it ever be. But that's how it went with blogging. A few years ago, search engines and their employees jumped into the world of blogging (our Search Engine Land blogroll lists a number of these). "Who's blogging" lists soon emerged, until blogging became so mainstream that people stopped bothering to keep track. [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Employees | Ask: Promotions | Blekko | Channel: Industry | Features: General | Google: Employees | Google: Marketing | Microsoft: Employees | Microsoft: Marketing | Top News

Rich Skrenta -- who, aside from creating the first computer virus, is more notable to search as a cofounder of the Open Directory Project and the Topix news search engine -- has announced he's founded a search start-up. A stealth one, as TechCrunch puts it. Don't we already have several stealth search start-ups? Yep. Here's a guide to who's who. Blekko What we know so far about Blekko isn't much, and TechCrunch has the most details in its The Next Google Search Challenger: Blekko post from yesterday. Apparently Rich founded the company in September 2006, along with five othe [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Industry | Google: Business Issues | Search Engines: Hakia | Search Engines: Mahalo | Search Engines: Other Search Engines | Search Engines: Search Wikia