Blekko

Blekko (own spelling blekko ) is a search engine that has taken the official operation on 1 November 2010. Blekko is operated by the U.S. company Blekko Inc.. The company was launched in 2007, among other things by Rich Skrenta, founder of the Open Directory Project.

Concept

Blekko is different from most search engines in that in the production of results, users are heavily involved with. Users of the service should improve the data base by categorizing search results, comment and create filters. The filtering of search results done by means of so-called slash tags. Slash tags are appended to search queries to restrict search results to web pages on a topic such as health, money or cars.

Unlike other search engines Blekko has its algorithm, ie the sorting of search results disclosed.

Apps

In January 2013, Blekko has introduced under the name Izik an application for tablets running the operating system Apple iOS or Android. Compared to search engine Blekko itself, which primarily involves the user in the search to Izik differentiates the graphical presentation of the results. Instead of a classical ( mainly text-based ) list of websites, the software generates for each request a kind of magazine, the presentation is oriented to services like Flipboard or Google Currents. The app supports multi-finger gestures.

Criticism

One criticism is that the focus is currently on English-language websites and filters. In addition, in relation to Google, Yahoo or bing only three billion web pages indexed. On the part of Blekko this is justified to try to clean up the web search and filter out the spam. In addition, user involvement carries the risk of inappropriate comments and link categorizations and thus the manipulation of search results. For example, as George W. Bush with the category miserable failure are connected - as is the case with the Google - bomb.