Blekko is the latest search startup to challenge Google. The goal of Blekko is to improve the relevancy of search results by leveraging the wisdom of the humans it serves. It is another entrant banking on the power of social search.
Blekko is structured a little differently from the other primary search engines. It works with a tagging system and encourages users to participate in contributing to the search engine process to improve it. Users define their own vertical search indexes by creating slashtags which results in limiting the category of search results for a particular term. It is modeled on the Twitter concept of hashtags to organize and categorize tweets. By creating different categories or slashtags it helps people to avoid irrelevant search results that arise from different meanings that can be attached to a search term. An example of this is a search on the word Dominoes. If you search the term on Google the first search result returned is the pizza chain Dominoes with a second return from Wikipedia about the game dominoes. With the Blekko system of slashtags you can select a slashtag for games which would automatically remove any search results not associated to the game of dominoes.
This is yet another twist on social searching. It puts more and more control in the hands of the users to further refine their own search results based on preferences. Blekko also allows you to access friends slashtags and offers direct access to third party APIs. This allows you to see what others are thinking and how they are categorizing their searches to help you create more efficient and effective tags. Of course, Blekko has already created hundreds of different tags to get you started.
A possible benefit to Blekko is the ability to search heavily spammed categories with much greater ease and efficiency. Some other features that may be appealing to the masses include the ability to opml and text files to your slashtags as well as favorite URLs. You can also see a list of followers to see who is following a particular slashtag.
It will be interesting to see how Blekko fares against Google, BING and Yahoo. What is certain is that social search innovation will continue to be a by- product of competition between the search engines as they look for more ways to personalize and refine the search process for ease of use and to return the most relevant search results possible in the shortest period of time.
It is clear that social search is here to stay. Human input will continue to drive the evolution of social search. The connections between people and the personal habits and preferences of individuals will continue to drive the marketing process.
Understanding how search is evolving and the greater role people will have in defining search results is critical for business owners to understand. By understanding how social search is evolving and what human inputs search engines are layering on top of technical criteria will determine how successful your marketing approaches are. Plug into social search. Make friends and participate in online communities so you can keep abreast of the changing field of online search. By keeping your finger on the pulse of the search engines and the social communities you can optimize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Writer, Jeff Beale, SEO Consultation provide you social Search optimization Services. They have vast experience in executing internet marketing consultation and search engine optimization Project.