Blekko Partners With Stack Overflow To Improve Search Results

Blekko and Stack Overflow have announced a partnership that aims to use the latter’s community of programmers to improve programming- and tech-related searches on Blekko.

The agreement calls for Stack Overflow’s community of programmers to “help improve and maintain programming-related slashtags,” while Stack’s CTO, Jeff Atwood, will be the editor of those slashtags. Stack Overflow’s logo will show up on search results that have been curated by Atwood and the editor team.

Some members of the Stack Overflow community have been active in discussions about search engine spam, particularly the recent debate over spam and search quality on Google. See Google May Let You Blacklist Domains To Fight Spam for a little more and a related link to discussion on Hacker News.

Late last year, Blekko announced a partnership with DuckDuckGo where those two small search engines agreed to share information and search results.

The idea of turning to a community of experts to help curate search results is an interesting and potentially successful tactic for Blekko. I’ve argued in face-to-face conversations with Bing and Google engineers that they should remove the low-quality, ad-heavy, and often inaccurate lyrics portals in favor of lyrics found on artist fan sites — lyrics that are often posted after hours of painstaking listening for detail and accuracy. No such luck on that so far for me and my U2 site, but there’s always hope.