Blekko - The "Slashtag" Search Engine

A new search engine called "Blekko" has arrived and it has a chance to be something that not even Google can be. What makes Blekko different is it's use of a "slash" to create a specialty search for a topic. In other words, if I want to find out about Snew the band, I can zero in on just that by typing "snew/band" instead of "snew band."

Basically what the "slashtag" does is focus the search. In the case of "Snew band," a lot of irrelevant results pop up from "what's new" to results about bands that have nothing to do with Snew. If I plug in "snew/band," a whole new set of results pops up that are specifically related to Snew the band.

There are other ways to use the slashtag as well.

You can use "xx/people" to limit the search to pages associated with a person.
You can use "xx/blogs" to limit the search to pages associated with only a blog.
You can use "xx/date" to limit the search to pages associated with only a certain date.

Of course, you can do all of this with Google as well, but it's a lot more difficult.

Below is a screen shot of a search for "honey/bees" with Blekko on the left and the results from Google on the right. You can see how much more specific the Blekko search is.

Here's a great article that describes Blekko and it's other operations in detail. Give it a try. I think you'll like it. In a future post, we'll talk about music implications.

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