If Google and Wikipedia were to give birth, their babies might look like Blekko. Blekko is a new search engine with results gathered and put together by people not computer algorithms. The users of the site are the ones in charge of assigning tags to web pages indexed by Blekko. This is very similar to the way Wikipedia users keep the online encyclopedia up to date by adding and changing entries as needed except with a search engine. People who use the site are the ones in charge of putting tags on websites that are indexed by Blekko. Blekko claims that it is more efficient than big competitors like Google as well as every other search engine because their search engine is designed to weed out spam along with also weeding out any results from content farms which research trendy subjects than pay writers to write a short synopsis about the given subject. This type of search engine is not the first of its kind but for now it looks like it will be the best of its kind. Blekko isn't the first search engine that attempts to let volunteer editors organize search results. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, started a similar search engine Wikia in 2008, only to shut it the following year, saying, “it (Wikia) wasn't as successful as hoped.” The difference between Wikia and Blekko is when Wikia came out it indexed between 50 million and 100 million websites. This is only a fraction of how many sites Blekko has indexed which is ranging around 3 billion different sites.
Blekko is one of the best things to happen to the search engine market because if it develops a market share and people start tagging websites then it will be one of the best search engines out. Google is very frustrating because people have to sort through mostly useless sites to find the sites they need. Blekko on the other hand is websites that are tagged by people who have found the information they needed and tagged the website so others searching for a similar topic can use the same website as them. The sad thing for Blekko is that although their idea is innovative it is not sustainable. Google is a huge company that is always looking to expand and make their products better. If Google sees that they are losing people to a site like Blekko then they will quickly act to improve their own search engine to make it better then their competitor or just try to buy it like they did with youtube.com and other things that they were interested in. Whatever the future holds for Blekko is unknown, what is known is the fact that users of search engines like myself are very thankful for a new search engine that is detailed to the person looking for information and not the providers of the information. Although Blekko’s chances of growing and sustaining their business is very slim considering the competition they are going up against, all users of search engines should be thankful that someone is keeping big companies like Google from becoming complacent and making them always find ways to make their search engine better.
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