Meet Blekko, A New Search Engine With Slashtags

Blekko is the Web's latest and much talked-about search engine. Blekko tries to differentiate from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing by trying to reduce unwanted and undesired search results with the help of something called as 'slashtags'. Although still in beta, Blekko looks very interesting.

Blekko's mantra is simple -- instead of giving you results from a broad spectrum of websites, which may or may not be contextual, Blekko tries to concentrate on relevant search results up front so you don't spend time sifting through 'spam'. And it does this mostly through slashtags.

Slashtags? What slashtags?
What are slashtags? A term appended to your search keyword, to put it simply. For example: pcworld /tech -- /tech, in this case, is a slashtag. With slashtags, Blekko tries to narrow your search down to specific areas of interest and return search results from trusted websites in that domain.

All slashtags form an edited list of websites that Blekko keeps track of, manually. If you register and login to Blekko, you can create your own slashtags and find popular slashtags.

You can tag a particular search result, check its SEO, look at links pointing to that website, talk about it or flag it up as spam on Blekko.

With slashtags, you can search under particular websites right now: e.g. search for phones /amazon will give you search results from Amazon.com related to mobile phones.

Bekko = Google killer?
Not at all, from the evidence at hand. And despite 'spam' in search results, two-thirds of the world still uses Google for a reason. Although Blekko's search engine has more promise than Wolfram Alpha. The only benefits I see in using Blekko is to search through slashtags and have guaranteed search results from trustworthy sites.

Check out Blekko at http://www.blekko.com.