I was just blown away by Blekko - because I finally paid closer attention to what they are doing with their slashtags. Wow! Please don't make the mistake I did and bolt now because "slashtags" sounds techie or boring. It's too important to miss out on! Jump down a bit and I'll explain what they do in brief (I'll do my best).
FYI - I actually think they are a superior search engine to Google right now! One rev/evo-lutionary feature makes that a reality. In fact, if I were Google, I'd knock on their door and invite them to inspect the shipping skid outside with the billion dollars sitting on it. Wink, wink...
Admittedly, I knew about Blekko before, but I didn't put in the effort to understand the slashtag feature. I mistakenly ended up thinking their slashtags were just a built-in part of their algorithm. They have that too - but what I didn't realize... is that they're doing exactly what I'd later end up drooling over after writing up my idea about wanting a Google Search with Site Lists.
What is so amazing about Blekko?
Ok, here it is. Blekko lets you create and share lists of sites for a particular topic. Then when you search (just like Google) you can limit your results only to those sites (unlike Google). If you don't have your own list of sites, you can find lists created by others.
Note: For those of you that know how to use the "site:" operator in Google, it's not the same thing because they can only limit to one site at a time. Not good enough!
Why is this so drool worthy?
When you search Google, you're searching among over a trillion different pages and growing. That trillion pages is going to include all kinds of stuff you have no interest in... including spammy stuff.
So what if you could just search a list of great sites that you know will have what you're looking for?
That's what Blekko lets you do and it's simply *not* possible with Google.
Example #1 - Finding a Web software
You need some software that does something specific. Or you heard about software, but you don't remember it's name. If you find a Blekko slashtag site list (or make one) that contains say the top 25 Web startup blogs, you can search just those sites and find the result quickly. You'll be narrowing your search to several thousand pages instead of over one trillion! Most importantly, you're likely to find what you're looking for very quickly... saving you hours and a huge amount of frustration! That's power!
Example #2 - Genealogy Research
You're researching your family genealogy and you've discovered that there are 10 extremely useful sites that deal with your area. You will probably do hundreds of different searches. If you do those searches on Google, you're going to be overloaded with messy results that would be way better for you if they were limited to your 10 most useful sites. If you add those sites to a slashtag list on Blekko, you can search just those sites. That's power!
Example #3 - Your favorite movies quotes
IMDB has a quotes page for the movies in their database. What if you wanted to be able to find quotes from your top 50 favorite movies of all time? This would take hours of relentless searching with Google and hundreds of different searches. With Blekko you could create a slashtag list of the quote pages ONLY for your top 50 favorite movies. Then when you search for a quote about a particular topic, you could limit the search to only quotes that are listed for your top 50 movies. Quote your favorites only... and you could find them with one search only on Blekko. Bloggers and writers will realize instantly how awesome that idea is alone! That's power!
The examples of search power you get with Blekko are virtually unlimited!
In my mind, Blekko's site lists with slashtags is the most powerful feature in search today - as if I didn't make that completely obvious already!
Unfortunately, I think it's an undiscovered treasure for most Web users.
Blekko - Thank you guys so much. You're doing it right!
tl;dr - Blekko let's you search only sites you know are great, all at once, with zero spam. Find stuff super fast, save hundreds of hours.
How Blekko Crushes Google with Slashtags!
sairanjank
Feb 5 2012 14:24
Blekko is better than Google. They need some advertising.
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Topics: 103
Replies: 370
Beyond the UI, one of the potential problems I've noticed with Blekko is that it doesn't seem to support advanced search operators. The "intitle:" operator is fundamental and I can't seem to find any info on such operators.
Without these operators, the slashtag feature is still extremely powerful. I love it. However, my Google research always include making use of the advanced operators.
They also don't appear to handle negation well.
I think my biggest wish would be that Google would acquire Blekko and bring the team onboard with them.
The goal would be to build "Google Site Circles" which would be a more user friendly method of implementing the slashtag concept and would allow for all of Google's current advantages as the leading search provider with an infrastructure that supports advanced operators.
Have "collections of sites" you can search against with full Google power is almost a no-brainer. I'm wondering if there are patents or something out there that prevent them from moving ahead with it.
Without these operators, the slashtag feature is still extremely powerful. I love it. However, my Google research always include making use of the advanced operators.
They also don't appear to handle negation well.
I think my biggest wish would be that Google would acquire Blekko and bring the team onboard with them.
The goal would be to build "Google Site Circles" which would be a more user friendly method of implementing the slashtag concept and would allow for all of Google's current advantages as the leading search provider with an infrastructure that supports advanced operators.
Have "collections of sites" you can search against with full Google power is almost a no-brainer. I'm wondering if there are patents or something out there that prevent them from moving ahead with it.
