Blekko Introduces Slashtags for Better Search Results

When I first heard of Blekko in my local news, I was pretty unimpressed. I already was using Google, the best search engine, and occasionally Bing, another solid contender. However, when I saw that Blekko utilized something called Slashtags to help narrow down your searches, I was pretty interested.

Let’s say I wanted a liberal view of Barack Obama. To do that, I would search “Barack Obama/Liberal”. If I wanted a meaty salad, I could search “Salad/Meaty”, and so on.

After looking at the picture above, you can tell there are a few problems with this service. When Slashtags are actually created for a subject, Blekko works out nicely. But there is no Slashtag created for Techi, and you can see the first 7 results have absolutely NOTHING to do with Techi.

Blekko search still has a long way to go to actually compete with other search engines. Google and Bing all have cool features, where if you searched something like “Movie times San Jose,” you would be able to see the movie times, without even having to go to the website of your local movie theater. Blekko also doesn’t have Slashtags available for a big number of topics, which sometimes makes search a little frustrating. Blekko won’t be a Google killer, but it could be a nice little niche for a few select people.