Internet resources: Blekko launches new search engine

On November 1 Blekko officially opened its beta, launching a new search engine that brings large-scale human supervision of web search. The result is an improved search experience that focuses on delivering results from high quality sites and leaving behind spammers, aggregators and content farms.

The new service aims to exclude websites featuring dubious ads and low-quality content from the list of search results. Algorithms of existing search engines are not always able to detect and exclude unreliable sites from the search result list, while participation of users in sources selection may improve the search quality.

Blekko is partly implementing the concept of catalogues, which is being made use by many existing search engines. Users can track down data on websites, selected by editors and grouped thematically. Service developers have specified around 300 topical groups, and in case the system discerns that the search query falls into one of seven categories (health, autos, hotels, colleges etc.), filtration of results is applied automatically. The company’s initial goal would be to identify the best sites on the Web for the top 100,000 search categories. What is more, Blekko hopes that users will make a contribution, as unlike the competitors, Blekko enables users to identify their own sets of “reliable” Internet resources.