What do you think about Blekko?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Disgruntled Goat in the UK, who asks, “What do you think of the new search engine Blekko? Do you think slashing the web will catch on?” So in general, I love when new search engines launch. It’s always cool to run a few queries and see, how do they score things differently than we would score things? There’s Blekko. There’s also a slightly smaller search engine called DuckDuckGo, if you guys haven’t checked that out. So I think it’s fantastic to have a lot of competition. I think it’s good for users, as long as people are competing on a level or fair playing ground. So whether slashing the web will catch on. So this is the thing where you can say, slash health, or slash, you know, auto, or whatever. And people can build up different tags that say, oh, search over these results, which I trust, or search over these results, which are maybe Democratic versus Republican, and stuff like that. It’s unclear to me how much it will catch on. Because it is some amount of work to build those individual restricts, or groups, or collections. But they do a relatively good job of showing autocomplete, and sort of suggesting tags that you might want to add. So I also have to give Blekko props, because I think they wrote quite a bit of it in PERL. And that’s an impressive feat, for anybody to write a major search engine in PERL. I think they also crawl like 3 billion pages. So you know, I love when new search engines launch. I think competition is great. It keeps us on our toes. It makes sure that we’re doing the right things. So I highly encourage people to check out Blekko and DuckDuckGo. See what you like, see what you don’t like. Certainly with power users, I think, it certainly will have some amount of appeal. And then time will tell. The wonderful thing is that everybody has different philosophies about how to improve search, and how to make search better. So this is another company trying out their idea, their philosophy. And we’ll just see how well it works.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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