News Report #5

“A New Search Engine, Where Less Is More”
Claire Cain Miller, The New York Times
10/31/2010
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/technology/01search.html?_r=1&ref=technology>

It is very often in which the public hears of a new and improved search engine trying to take on the popular and widely used search engine, Google, by offering more efficient ways to search the internet and better search results.  The goal of the most recent search engine named Blekko, co-founded by a man named Rich Skrenta, is to provide search results only from websites that are relevant to the search topic, while also being reliable, as to eliminate viruses and spam.  In doing this, Blekko explores about three billion websites, but only gives the best results, most relatable to the search topic.  When searching one of the topics that are most likely to come up with search results known for containing spam in them, the search engine comes up with an edited list referred to as slashtags.  Even though it is expected that Blekko will have many users after it launches, it is not going to be something that is detrimental to Google.

Although it is hard to imagine using any other search engine besides Google, because my life has become so dependent on it, I really like the concept of Blekko.  I suspect that it will be very popular, as it can be quite a hassle to search through tons of search results to find ones that are even relevant to the topic that was searched.  The fact that Blekko in a way, weeds out the useless web pages, that other search engines may come up with in search results, is very beneficial to the searcher and will save them time by not having to look through irrelevant websites.  Reading this article actually convinced me to give Blekko a try and see if the results given to me from this search engine are more useful than the ones I receive when searching in Google.