A search engine that's both personal & social
The above is a peek into the future of search engines. Everyone uses google, and their mothers use Yahoo. But increasingly we may see some advanced users using search engines like blekko who have found a great niche in making advanced and custom searching easy. It's been a unacknowledged need of mine for a while that when doing deep research in a very obscure topic, it's hard to find the information that you need. This is because not many people are linking to relevant articles, for one reason or another. Or because many of the links are sponsored or overly targeted by seo firms (overlinked?). Blekko allows you to easily filter and sort results like things like date, or SEO rank. More interestingly, you can search pre-defined slices of the web using "slash tags". So /tech will give you technology related websites and /techblogs will give you ... yes, blogs related to technology. It also changes the game a bit in a few essential ways: Searches become personal After a few minutes on blekko you start migrating websites that you find yourself visiting time and time again to lookup information. This creates of list of favorites that is difficult to replace by the standard google, yahoo, bing offering. These engines have not made it clear that their algorithm's are better than blekko's, so we assume they are comparable. As a heavy internet user & search maniac, I appreciate the customization and anything that reduces my time to information. blekko increases the stickiness of the search experience Personalization is king here. Also, they allow teams of people to edit any particular tag. So for example, the tag of "marketing" is claimed by 3 people at this point in their beta existence, but any number of people can contact the owners thusfar and request to be a editor as well. Those with the largest following, I'm assuming will be elevated at some point to be a preferred tag. Possibly be the default tag of the blekko-sphere. Yes, google is attractive because of the sheer pervasive nature of their set of apps, and the fact that I can talk search into my Android phone. For quick things, Google still works best. But for difficult things, other search engines like Wolfram and Blekko may be increasingly tapped. Searches become more social I can follow other users' set of searches. While this would be possibly a liability for google because of the omnipresent attention on how much personal information they're collecting on all of us, it's not a problem for a new entrant like blekko. I can follow other users with interesting tags and take their ideas for sets of websites (which comprise a tag search), and build upon it, or create variants. All in all, it's one of the best new web tools I've seen out there, and it'll be great to see where they go from here.
