Blekko

Blekko, trademarked as blekko (lowercase),^[1] was a company that provided a web search engine with the stated goal of providing better search results than those offered by Google Search, with results gathered from a set of 3 billion trusted webpages and excluding such sites as content farms. The company's site, launched to the public on November 1, 2010, used slashtags to provide results for common searches. Blekko also offered a downloadable search bar. It was acquired by IBM in March 2015, and the service was discontinued.

blekko.com

Blekko home page
Type of site	Search engine
Available in	English
Owner	IBM (International Business Machines)
URL	www.blekko.com
Launched	November 1, 2010
Current status	Defunct (March 27, 2015)

Slashtags

Blekko used an initiative called slashtags,^[1] consisting of a text tag preceded by a "/" slash character, to allow ease of searching and categorise searches. System and pre-defined slashtags allowed users to start searching right away. Users could create slashtags after signup, to perform custom-sorted searches and to reduce spam.^[2]

Features

The following features were available to all users:

• Search engine optimization statistics. From 2012 subject to payment.^[3]
• Linking pages (in and out statistics)
• IP address lookup
• Cached pages
• Tagging of pages
• Finding duplicate content
• Comparing sites
• Crawl statistics
• Page count
• Location of robots.txt
• Cohosted sites
• Page latency
• Page length

Toolbar

Blekko offered a downloadable browser toolbar or search bar which changes default search and home page URLs of the user's web browsers.^[4]

Reception

In 2010, John Dvorak described the site as adding "so much weird dimensionality" to search, and recommended it as "the best out-of-the-chute new engine I've seen in the last 10 years".^[5] In Matthew Rogers' review of the site, he found it "slow and cumbersome", and stated that he did not understand the necessity or utility for slashtags.^[6] In his PCMag.com review, Jeffrey L. Wilson expressed approval of some search results, but criticized the site's social features which "bog down the search experience."^[7]