Ambitious

New Search Engine Launches Monday

Blekko cuts out “content farms,” introduces slash tags.

On Monday, a new search engine called Blekko launches. The website’s goal, according to its founder Rich Skrenta, is to cull results from only trustworthy sources, cutting out “content farms” and websites that are overrun with links for search-engine-optimization purposes. “The goal is to clean up Web search and get all the spam out of it,” said Skrenta. One of Blekko’s best new features is “slash tags,” which will narrow the scope of a search. SearchEngineLand.com offers a handy example of how slash tags work: If you type “honey” into Google, among your first results will be an IMDB page for a 2003 movie with that name. However, a Blekko search of “honey /bees” narrows results to items just about the food product. Similarly, a search of “iPad/Amazon” will search Amazon.com for iPads.