Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2011, shortly after Blekko’s public launch. Blekko was later acquired by IBM in 2015 and the search engine shut down, so the whole piece is a period review.
This week our friends at TechCrunch were covering the search engine that may well end up being the alternative to Google. They accused Google of not ranking its results properly: when you ran a search, the top results included sponsored pages and many others devoted to spam, considered irrelevant. So, on top of the monopoly Google has built, they put forward Blekko as a capable search engine that could end up ahead of Google and Bing (Microsoft).
Investors must have taken the news seriously, because they’ve already put several million dollars into Blekko. Naturally, we had to try the search engine ourselves, so here’s our personal opinion.
To begin with, I searched for my own pages on Blekko, and it seems its indexing “spider” skipped my blog, or it simply doesn’t like pages with a blue background.
Then I ran a few searches for information I use every day, and it threw up completely irrelevant results. What’s more, if they complain that Google’s results include spam, Blekko’s results are the spammers’ bible: all I found were affiliate program pages.
As for search quality, I’m not exaggerating: you can search for “cinema tickets” and get car dealerships. So I shudder to think of Blekko ever becoming the alternative to Google.
While Bing and Yahoo are, for now, mopeds chasing Google’s jet engine, Blekko is, for now, a blind man running after his dog.
Google did a magnificent job in its early days and has never stopped improving its algorithm so it can give us better results every day, which is why most of us prefer it. It may not be perfect, but they strive for perfection, while the rest, for now, are only striving to be somewhat competent.
Further reading
- Monitor your online reputation with Google Alerts
- Facebook is becoming a serious problem for the internet
Featured image: Robert Scoble, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
