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Search Engine News: Blekko: Trying to Slash the Competition

Now that it is in public beta we can share some of our initial thoughts on Blekko. I’ll start by saying that I am certainly not the foremost expert on search engines, but I will say that this is why my view is important. I’m a user and I depend on these tools to provide results.

I love innovation as much as the next geek but when results are hindered by complexity I lose interest. This is what is happening with Blekko. Let me clarify that Blekko is still beta and when a tool is in beta you expect  to not get perfect functionality. The trouble I am having with Blekko is that they are trying to introduce a completely new way of search to users that is potentially complex and requires users to learn a new process. It leverages what they call Slashtags. Slashtags according to Blekko’s site “allows users to slash in what they want and slash out what they don’t want”.

These slashtags work like filters and are built by you or others around the web. The idea is that the filters should contain the top rated sites bringing back only relevant results.  In my opinion they’ve slashed out a large chunk of search users based on the fact that they have to learn a new way. I still find value here and we’ll share that in an upcoming post.

Based on the sites strengths and the people I’ve been able to speak with on Blekko it’s better used for quick research, SEO metrics and statistics. Sourcers and Market Mappers, this may be a nice addition to your suite of tools.

Blekko CEO speaks about the new release:

 

For better or for worse Google introduced a simplistic method of search. This has rung supreme eating more than 60% of the search market and could be the reason for Blekko being overlooked by everyday users. It happened to Cuil another engine that I liked but ultimately has failed to live up to its initial buzz.  I am sure they’ll see some great traffic and buzz in the first few months but in the end I think we can chalk this one up to just another search engine.

Did you know who rules Search Engine Market Share?

  1. Google: 62.9%
  2. Yahoo!: 19.2
  3. Bing: 12.5%
  4. Ask: 3.4%
  5. AOL: 2.0%

I’m not sure yet who the target audience is but it’s surely not the everyday browser.

Subscribe here to learn how to use Blekko to search resumes. We will be featuring a post dedicated to searching with Blekko in the coming days.

 Read more on Blekko here

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By Noel Cocca

CEO/Founder RecruitingDaily and avid skier, coach and avid father of two trying to keep up with my altruistic wife. Producing at the sweet spot talent acquisition to create great content for the living breathing human beings in recruiting and hiring. I try to ease the biggest to smallest problems from start-ups to enterprise. Founder of RecruitingDaily and our merry band of rabble-rousers.