Alternative search engine Blekko launches

No toolbar trying to be installed here. Also no attempts to change my default home page. I like it so far.

 

Yeah, I always wondered just what the butler saw.

Honestly though, I used to use Jeeves a lot, then the page started to get a bit 'widgety' so I went back to Google. On Chrome though I just have speed dial as my homepage & so I can bypass the often slightly over-active Jeeves homepage. I forgot what a good search engine it actually is.

 

Maybe they've changed their policy. It seems to have lasted longer than a fortnight anyway. I'm a bit paranoid about search engines that I can't use WOT in though.

 

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/04/blekko-2/

 

I got tired waiting for it to die and decided to make it default. Any simple write-up on how to use it, for example, to search a single site?

 

I know I am a little late to the party but I just found out about this today So here are my first thoughts:

I learned about Blekko through the TechCruch article talking about how they launched the new search boxes and other widgets so I decided to take a look at what they were making a big deal out of. Now after trying it I love the idea of grouping sites and allowing you to search a group by topic. I see how it come in handy now and I have already been using it a bunch.

The extra tools come in handy for website owners/bloggers (like myself) in checkout out the SEO. It even told me when the last time my site was crawled, how many incoming links I have, where my links are coming from. It was so clear and simple that I added a SEO link badge to my blog to share the results I got from it.

Next up was the results. Now Blekko is much newer then the other search giants out there so it did not have many of the smaller sites I visit. In fact when I first looked up my blog it have only two results saying my blog has not been crawled. Since watching it my blog is getting pushed into the list of results and i have been thinking of adding a Blekko search button to my blog. Its that good in my opinion, quick and easy without a ton of spam sites.

The Facebook integration was cool type in /likes once you connect to Facebook and it will show what all your friends likes are. That's something I don't see on many other search engines.

So far my time with Blekko has been very good and I am starting to really love it. Google instant turned me a way because it only worked half the time and at the moment I have been using Yahoo search. It may be switching to Blekko very soon.

 

I visited the site and typed in a search and had no toolbar forced at me.

 

No toolbar also. Looks promising but still needs some work.

 

They've obviously changed their policy on toolbars. I had another look at Blekko & I must say it is starting to look a bit more promising. The more alternatives to Google the better I suppose. It's a pity WOT doesn't work in it though.

 

It also provides access to secure protocol -https://blekko.com

But, I dislike this -https://blekko.com/ws/+/privacy

That's all it took me not to like this service, unlike...

-https://eu.ixquick.com It has served its purpose very well so far!

-https://ixquick.com/uk/privacy-policy.html

Fair enough, IMO.

 

That's a good find m00nbl00d Start Page is the same thing I think.

Edit: I've just noticed that I can use WOT in Start Page but not in Ixquick, which is strange ...

Edit #2: This appears to have been fixed & WOT works in Ixquick now. They have been making changes to their own start page so it may be something to do with that.

 

Blekko? It doesn't rhyme with anything so how can it be any good?

On the other hand "Duck" rhymes with lots of words.

Quaaack!

 

Can you use WOT with https://eu.startpage.com/uk/ ?

 

Yes!

 

Thanks for confirming. I was just wondering if WOT would fail displaying results in https. I don't personally use it, so I just wondered if that could be it.

 

I dunno, it rhymes with Gecko. That rhymes with: Fellow, Groucho, Gizmo etc ... LOL!

 

Interestingly, the green '0' icon appears at the start of each individual search entry rather than after it, as is usual in Bing, Ask Jeeves & Google. Either way, it works perfectly.

 

If blekko doesn't find anything, it provides results from bing !

 

"An Algorithm for finding, killing Spam" :

http://blog.blekko.com/2011/03/09/an-algorithm-for-finding-killing-spam/

 

I have still been using it, its slowly getting bigger. It seems to have started crawling a bit of my site. The only item from Blekko I can't seem to use is the Blekko search widget I added to my blog, it never follows the slashtag I added to it.

 

But Google now allows us to block specific sites from appearing in the search results. Of course, the pound of flesh is that we must be signed in. That's where my evil twin is useful.