What is Blekko?
Blekko is an internet search engine that launched in 2010 with the goal of improving search quality and relevance. It was founded by Rich Skrenta, who previously created the Open Directory Project. Blekko aims to solve issues with traditional search engines returning too many low-quality results.
A key feature of Blekko is its use of slashtags, which are tags that categorize search results and allow users to filter down to specific types of pages. For example, searching for [apples /nutrition] would return nutrition-related results about apples. This lets users precisely control the focus of their search.
Blekko also heavily curates its index, relying on both algorithms and human editors to evaluate websites and designate high-quality, informative sites as good matches for search queries. By whitelisting trustworthy domains, Blekko reduces spam and avoids some of the content farm issues facing other search engines.
While Blekko has not challenged the market dominance of Google Search, its focus on relevant results in specific niches has won it a loyal user base. It continues to iterate on features for customizable, high-precision searching.
Yandex.Search, Wolfram Alpha, Google Search, DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Bing, Searx, Startpage, Qwant, YaCy, MetaGer, Ecosia, Disconnect Search are some alternatives to Blekko.