[caption id="attachment_11198" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Blekko"]
[/caption]Blekko, a new breed of search engine launched its public beta today. Blekko tries to deliver better search results by combining technology with the Wikipedia model. That means hundreds of users evaluate the content and determine whether something is spam or not.
The search engine results that Blekko delivers resemble Google results from about 9 months ago.
The main feature that distinguishes Blekko from other search engines are its slashtags. Blekko users assign sites to a certain slashtag that they deem related.
“Today is the first step in a process of building a volunteer army at Blekko that will eventually slash spam from search and deliver the most relevant results,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko. “As the number of URLs on the web increases from billions to trillions, it will take a layer of human oversight to separate the trusted content from the spam.”
Blekko is fueled by 24 million of venture capital. They use it to "slash the web". I guess they mean the want to slash the spam. But most likely they are right, with their approach they would slash the good results too. It's not good to use an old word with a new, invented definition.
Their examples shown on their homepage already gives an interesting insight into Blekko's frame of mind. They write: "examples: cure for headaches | global warming /liberal". Looks like they are looking for a cure for headaches, while they are liberal and interested in global warming. That exactly matches the Wikipedia crowd.
The whole thing sounds nice. But the problem with this approach: The people who have time to go through all the web sites are very often either rather uneducated or have strange agendas. Just go to Wikipedia and cross check some of their pages - horrible. You see very slanted information and very often propaganda and extreme lies.
In theory it sounds great: recruit a hoard of stupid apes and let them skim though web site to eliminate the spam. This will very soon turn into slanted garbage. But fine, it's not my 24 million that get drowned.
Most likely Blekko will be an interesting experiment, but it is very unlikely that they will be successful with this approach.
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