A new search engine that became accessible to the public Monday is taking aim at Google's failure to weed out useless spam sites from its results.Blekko, the latest kid on the search engine block, is hoping to give out more refined results from trustworthy sources and avoid pointing to bogus sites created by content farms and other internet bottom-feeders that subsist only to collect traffic.
"The goal is to fresh up Web search and get all the spam out of it," Blekko co-founder Rich Skrenta told The New.
Like Google, Bing, Ask.com and its other competitors, Blekko's search engine crawls billions of websites on any given search, but relies on what Skrenta calls "large-scale human curation" to edit the results into a batch of the most supportive sites
In particular, Blekko aims to clean up results in categories its creators have determined triggers mainly polluted results, including health, colleges, recipes, personal finance, hotels and cars.
The most important upgrade to Blekko's search engine is the addition of slashtags that auto-fire for queries that fall into one seven categories: health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels.
The auto-fire functionality is intended with passive searchers in mind, and aims to get rid of friction for first time users. The technology that powers these auto-slashtags was developed through a wide research and development phase that implicated analyzing the relationship between queries and the type of spam results they normally generate.
Blekko is presently available on the web or as a mobile-optimized site, but mobile applications are also said to be in the works.
