It's pretty rare that I am impressed enough with a site that I feel compelled to post about it. But this is a rare site. I first learned about
www.blekko.com from the T-shirt of one of my library's volunteers. It simply said "Blekko.com|spam-free search". That was all I needed to know. Being a news junkie like so many of us are the posibility of a search engine uncorrupted by spam was enough to merit a look.
So far I've only used it for one search, but it was enough to impress. Ever since I first heard about it during CPAC this year I have been interested in following the goings-on of the National Bloggers Club, that group of online creatures that model themselves after Breitbart and worse. But each time I have tried to find results about them through Google or other common search engines I have either encountered a lack of information or have had to try various contortions with my search terms in order to get anything current and/or worthwhile. Like any search engine you have to use proper formatting to get your preferred results, so using just the words National Bloggers Club returned results that were variations on 'national' or the other terms. But with "National Bloggers Club" in quotes I saw something I have not seen before - a full page of fully relevant results on my query.
I AM IMPRESSED!
Reading a little from the site info it appears that Blekko is something of a Wikipedia of search engines in that it is user guided and endeavors to steer away from advertised results and toward user-preferred results. But unlike Wikipedia it appears to be as yet uncorrupted. And most important is tha they intend to return not the most popular results but instead focus on the highest quality results possible so sites that use tags to get picked up on search engines through popular search terms are set aside by users finding those sites to have little actual relevance to their intended searches and instead the most relevant results are elevated. Still interested in learning more, but I wated to pot on this and see what feedback it generated as well as give others a chance to try this new source and see how it improves the finding of good news results for them.
