Blekko search engine looks like a great tool for web site owners and designers
I just got my invitation to the beta for Blekko, the latest challenger to Google.
First impressions: fantastic. While most searchers may accept the default settings and features that a search engine offers, Blekko goes out of its way to inspire power users with creative ways to ‘slash the web’.
I have to admit I haven’t yet properly compared the usefulness of the results — it’s only a beta after all — but have already spent far too much time trying out the tools that Blekko offers webmasters.
Briefly, Blekko allows you to set up (and share) your own ‘slashtags’, which can be used as filters for your results. So I created a ‘/clients’ slashtag, which allows me to search though our web design clients’ sites. And Blekko read my mind, offering me a customised search form to embed on our site, where visitors can do the same, as well an RSS feed of the results.
Even more interesting to those involved in the search engine optimisation of their sites, Blekko claims to be fully transparent with its ranking data.
Search results come with an ‘SEO’ link, leading to a goldmine of ranking data for each site in the list. Of course a lot of similar stuff is available from Google — but only to the webmaster or owner of the site. Blekko allows you to see everyone else’s data as well. This could change things.