“That means users will get the benefit of curated search results (i.e. no spam!) for over 500 search categories, regardless of whether or not they manually append a slashtag to their query,” Blekko says in a blog post.

“As we head into 2012, our mission at blekko is more important than ever,” Blekko says. “If you think about it, prior to the internet the newspaper was the offline equivalent of the search engine. It was the starting spot where people went to get their news, job listings, personals, movies listings, classifieds, etc. Competing editorial voices were a hallmark of competition in the newspaper business and readers benefited because they had choice.”

They point to searches for “how to clean gutters” and “good table manners” to show off their new indexing.

Then, they suggest trying out their 3 Engine Monte tool, which lets you compare results with Bing and Google.

Blekko says it purposefully biases its index away from sites with low quality content, and that it’s source-based rather than link-based. “We purposefully bias our index away from sites with low quality content. “Regardless of how many people link to healthspamsite.com, we believe sites like the Mayo Clinic, NIH.gov, etc. are better sites. On blekko, brands trump links,” Blekko says.

Blekko secured a $30 million round of funding in September, which CEO Rich Skrenta told WebProNews the company would be used to expand and grow the service through hiring, infrastructure ,marketing, etc.

When asked if Blekko intends to expand into areas beyond search, he simply said, “We are focused on delivering great, spam-free search results.”

Earlier this month, Blekko did launch an analytics tool called Web Grepper.

Skrenta said that he wanted Blekko to be the “third” search engine (along with Google and Bing) back when it launched. I don’t know that it’s very widely considered that yet, but the investment can’t hurt the company’s quest to get there, especially if they will indeed remained focused on search.

Of course, Yahoo might have something to say about that “third search engine” thing. While it does use Bing to power its back-end, the company has been very vocal about how seriously it still takes search. Last week, they said they’re ready for a “search fight”. I don’t think Blekko was their main concern though.

Are the search engines headed in the right direction? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Cutts on Why Your PageRank Would Drop

While not exactly an announcement, Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts did post a video discussing reasons why Google Toolbar PageRank would drop. We talked about this a little bit more here, but you can hear exactly what he had to say in this video:

There is a part in there where he mentions that if you were caught selling links, but have stopped and want to earn Google’s trust back, you should submit a reconsideration request. On that note, Google announced that it is getting “more transparent” with its reconsideration requests.

Better Communication

“Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request,” explain Tiffany Oberoi and Michael Wyszomierski of Google’s Search Quality team in a joint blog post. “Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.”

“If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well,” they add. “Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it.”

Google says it’s not able to reply to individual requests with specific feedback, but that now webmasters will be able to find out if their site has been affected by a manual action and will know the outcome of the reconsideration review.

Google Using Blocked Site Data in Algorithm

Earlier this year, Google announced some new domain blocking features, which included a browser extension, and a link next to search results, which allow users to block sites that they don’t like. This was part of Google’s big quality clean up initiative, which also includes the Panda update and the +1 button. Initially, the sites blocked were on a personalized basis, but that is no longer completely the case. Google search quality engineer Johannes Henkel is quoted as saying, “We’ve also started incorporating data about sites people have blocked into our general search ranking algorithms to help users find more high quality sites.”

Pagination and View-All in Search Results

Google is “making a larger effort” to return single-page versions of content in search results, when the content is broken up among multiple pages. Think multiple page articles and content slideshows. Google says users tend to prefer single page versions of content, but sometimes these can load slowly, so there are also times when the multiple pages work better.

“So while a view-all page is commonly desired, as a webmaster it’s important to balance this preference with the page’s load time and overall user experience,” Google indexing team software engineers Benjia Li & Joachim Kupke say in a joint blog post on the Webmaster Central blog.

You can read more about the technical specs here. They summarize it all nicely: “Because users generally prefer the view-all option in search results, we’re making more of an effort to properly detect and serve this version to searchers. If you have a series of content, there’s nothing more you need to do.”

To better optimize your view-all page, you can use rel=”canonical” from component pages to the single-page version; otherwise, if a view-all page doesn’t provide a good user experience for your site, you can use the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes as a strong hint for Google to identify the series of pages and still surface a component page in results.

They talk even more about the specs of using rel=”next” and rel=”rev” in this post.

Rich Snippets for Apps

Google is also showing rich snippets for apps in search results now. They’re getting info for these from various places including: Android Market, Apple iTunes and CNET.

“Before you install a software application, you may want to check out what others think about it and how much it costs,” says product manager Alejandro Goyen. “Starting today, you’ll be able to get information about the applications, including review and price information, right in your search results.”

That’s something to consider if your business has an app. It’s a reputation factor.

Editing in YouTube

This isn’t exactly a search feature, but when you consider how big a role video can play in search marketing and that YouTube is the second largest search engine, it’s certainly worth your attention. YouTube has launched new editing tools that allow you to easy edit videos right from YouTube itself.

This should help you improve your videos, which are not only searchable on the second largest search engine and embeddable across the web, but often appear right in the results of regular Google searches. This new editing functionality will make it easier to try new things with less successful videos and potentially make them more viral.

Bing Adaptive Search

Ok, getting away from Google, Bing has launched adaptive search, which is essentially its version of personalized search. The company says it “helps decipher the intent and context of each search you conduct based on your search history.”

“The concept of personalized search is not a new idea, but Bing continues to focus on it and drive progress as the search space evolves,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. “In fact, Bing views personalized search as less of a ‘feature’ and more of what to expect from search.”
 
“Ultimately, the goal is to reduce ambiguity and help people find what they’re looking for more quickly,” he adds. “The personalization can be pretty subtle to the naked eye, but the more Bing learns about your intent the more personal it will become. And Bing also wants to be sure a diverse set of results still show up so people aren’t locked in a ‘filter bubble’. We think this provides a good balance.”

You’ve been dealing with this kind of thing with Google for quite some time, but it does throw in another SEO factor to consider for Bing, which as previously mentioned continues to gain market share.

WebProNews is interviewing Bing’s Stefan Weitz as I write this, so check back at WebProNews for more on this soon.

New Analytics Tool from Blekko

Finally, alternative search engine Blekko has released an interesting search analytics tool, which some of you might find useful. It’s called “Web Grepper”.

“The Web Grepper searches for unique data information and trends that are embedded in code and cannot be found on any other search engine,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “For example, you could search to see how many pages request your user information when you visit, the types of  targeting information the site collecting, or how many sites have ‘Like’ vs ‘+1′ buttons, etc.”

Users can submit questions to the tool and the Blekko community votes on a daily basis on which questions will be analyzed.

These aren’t the only things going on in search this week, but these are some of the more noteworthy things that are likely to have a bigger impact on most site owners, than say things like Flight Search and Baseball scores.

Do any of these items concern you? Make your life easier? Let us know in the comments.

“The Web Grepper searches for unique data information and trends that are embedded in code and cannot be found on any other search engine,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “For example, you could search to see how many pages request your user information when you visit, the types of  targeting information the site collecting, or how many sites have ‘Like’ vs ‘+1′ buttons, etc.”

CEO Rich Skrenta says, “With Web Grepper, we’re offering our users unique access to the blekko index and embedded information that cannot be found on other search engines. “This allows users to uncover incredibly useful data that was previously inaccessible through a keyword search.”

Users can submit questions to the tool and the Blekko community votes on a daily basis on which questions will be analyzed.

This is an extension of the whole community-driven philosophy behind Blekko – and ultimately search in general. See Blekko’s slashtags.

The results will be displayed in a report.

Blekko says it will make sure it’s not being used as a hacking tool to get personal info by manually reviewing “greps” and monitoring malicious data mining behavior.

“Search has always been a personal experience but the escalating amount of spam on the Web is driving search to become social, where communities and groups of friends can help call out the best of results,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of blekko. “Foodily’s trusted community of cooks and food lovers will be a tremendous resource to blekko searchers.”

We talked to Skrenta last week about Blekko’s Zorro update, search quality, and filtering. The search engine is now integrating hundreds of its “slashtags” into search results. These are at the root of the human curation element of Blekko.

“Foodily’s mission is to help everyone find the food they want and love, and share it with their social circle. We’re excited to play a role in helping blekko searchers find great resources on food, cooking and recipes,” said Andrea Cutright, CEO of Foodily. “The Foodily community is rising to the challenge of bringing the best recipe content to the top, so we can all enjoy quickly finding that next great meal.”

ChaCha says it has “increased its accuracy and database of information” by adding computational knowledge from Wolfram Alpha. “This partnership means Wolfram Alpha will allow ChaCha users to access computed facts that cover over 100 topics,” a representative tells WebProNews. “This is in addition to ChaCha’s “ask-a-smart-friend” database that has already answered over one billion questions.”

In the partnership’s first day, Wolfram Alpha answered 32,000 of ChaCha’s incoming questions, ChaCha says.

“Zorro is a major upgrade in our relevance,” Skrenta tells WebProNews. ”blekko users have spent the past six months curating the web on category by category basis, telling us the best sites for broad categories like health and personal finance as well as narrower categories like gluten free.”

“Zorro incorporates those human-curation efforts into our result set for non-slashtag queries by boosting pages from the curated sites – even for non-slashtag queries,” he adds. ”With Zorro, we can boost results from multiple slashtags to make results better. ex.: https://blekko.com/ws/pregnancy+tips”

“The net result is further reduction of spam,” he says.

On how the Zorro update improves the search experience compared to competitors, Skrenta tells us, “Other search sites rely wholly on algorithmic intelligence for results. We are incorporating human-curation efforts directly into our results. Given the amount of SEO gaming being done, we believe that only humans can accurately differentiate a clever spam site from a quality site.”

“We initially integrated slashtags for 10 sites into our standard results,” he says. ”Now we are incorporating hundreds.  Our users have created over 100k slashtags since we launched.  That data wasn’t available on day 1.”

Blekko’s mission is to provide search results without spam. That takes a lot of filtering. There is a discussion going on around the web right now about how what we see on the web is becoming more and more filtered. Eli Pariser calls it the “Filter Bubble,” and DuckDuckGo, another alternative search engine and peer of blekko’s launched a site discussing this very topic. This is more about search engines and other sites (including social networks like Facebook) filtering what we see by tailoring content delivered to us on a personalized level. A lot of people don’t like the idea of having this content filtered. With blekko doing its own kind of filtering, we wondered what Skrenta might have to say about this.

“We’ve reached a tipping point on the web where it is easier to white list the set of good sites than black-list the set of bad sites,” he tells us.  “ex. the top 100 health sites will answer all your health questions.  You don’t want to search outside that set of sites.  Our efforts with Zorro combine the best of curation and algorithmic intelligence to deliver spam free results.”

Blekko somewhat famously (at least within the search industry) blocked a number of sites deemed “content farms” from its results. Even today, blekko’s home page carries the message: “Slashing out…spam…content farms…malware.” Among the sites blocked were a few from Demand Media, including eHow, which has consistently carried the “content farm” label, despite the company’s best efforts to position it in a different light.

Demand Media has made it a point to clean up eHow’s quality (more on this initiative here), so we wondered if blekko’s banning of eHow, or any site, can be reversed. “We constantly review sites for quality and our users continually identify quality sites for us,” Skrenta says.

Along with the Zorro update, blekko launched a little game called “3 Engine Monte“. It’s available via a link on blekko’s home page, and invites users to enter a query and then choose from a set of three results sets, which one they like the best. One is from Google, one is from Bing, and the other is of course from blekko.

We asked if the majority are picking blekko most often. “We are currently collecting data and will have results soon,” Skrenta tells us.

When asked about long-term goals for blekko, Skrenta simply says, “Clean up the web from spam, category by category.”

On the new results pages, users will see sites that others have hand-picked to be included in one or more slashtags. So far, users have created over 100,000 of them. The company considers this a human site review element to the “war on spam.” The slashtags appear at the top of the search results, and for each site boosted by the slashtag, next to its URL.

“Millions of users and hundreds of millions of searches have given us insight into what is truly great quality content on the Web and what is poor quality spam,” said Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. “This new version of blekko bakes in that intelligence in every search so the spam gets weeded out and the best content comes to the top in every search.”

In addition to that, search results will display sites’ logos. Blekko says this is so users can “quickly choose results from trusted brands that offer the best content.”

Though stumbling a bit in some months, Blekko has continued to grow since its launch. Compete has Blekko.com at 211k unique visitors in the U.S. last month, after launching last fall.

Finally, the Zorro update comes with a “new relevance model for ranking.” This includes “a ramped up adspam algorithm, identifying millions more pages on the Web that contain multiple ads and little content.” Such pages, Blekko says, have been permanently elminated from the index so they’ll never appear in search results.

Blekko is so confident in its search quality, it has also introduced a little game called 3 Engine Monte, which lets you enter a query and see three different sets of results. One comes from Blekko, and the others from Google and Bing. The user’s job is to pick which one they like best, and they think users are apt to pick Blekko fairly frequently, I’m assuming.

3 Engine Monte doesn’t appear to take into account various kinds of search results offered in the other engines through Universal search. For example, if I search for “mexican food” it doesn’t show me all of the local stuff and the images that Google actually shows me if I go to Google and perform the search. As far as the purse “ten blue links” type results, I’ll give Blekko credit for offering better ones (and Bing as well for that matter) in some instances that I tried.

Interestingly, it does show you which results in the competitors’ results that it has banned. The game can be accessed from the home page of Blekko.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity to partner with a great brand and an outstanding product that delivers such an awesome experience for its readers,” commented blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. “We hope we can make the experience even better by pointing Flipboard readers to the absolute best sources of content via RSS feeds on any topic, without spam.”

“Flipboard’s goal is to bring everything that you care about together into one place,” says Flipboard co-founder Evan Doll. “By adding blekko’s RSS search to Flipboard, you can now also find your favorite RSS feeds and enjoy them in a beautiful visual format within your social magazine.”

Blekko has been pretty busy. A couple weeks ago, the company announced that it was powering search on local news site Topix (which Skrenta co-founded). Since then, they announced new privacy features, including a 48-hour data retention policy.

Partnerships with other widely used sites and apps could be just what blekko needs to really gain some exposure and ground in the search space. It will be interesting to see what other companies partner with blekko going forward.

Even Google’s Matt Cutts is encouraging users to check the search engine out, saying that the competition helps keep Google on its toes. I don’t think Google is really on its toes too much because of blekko at this point (Bing might be a slightly different story), but blekko has only been around for a little more than half a year.

The discussion was spurred by a question submitted to him, asking what he thinks about Blekko. “In general, I love when new search engines launch,” he says. “It’s always cool to run a few queries, and see how do they score things differently than we would score things.”

“I think it’s fantastic to have a lot of competition,” he says. “I think it’s good for users, as long as people are competing on a level or fair playing ground.”

I can hear the critics of Google’s own competitive practices getting ready to chime in already.

On Blekko’s slashtag strategy, Cutts says, “It’s unclear it will catch on, because it is some amount of work to build those individual restricts or groups or collections, but they do a relatively good job of showing auto complete, and sort of suggesting tags you might want to add.”

“I love when new search engines launch. I think competition is great,” he reiterates. “It keeps us on our toes. It makes sure that we’re doing the right things. I highly encourage people to check out both Blekko and DuckDuckGo. See what you like, see what you don’t like. Certainly with power users, it will certainly have some amount of appeal, and then time will tell.”

“The wonderful thing is that everyone has different philosophies about how to improve search, and how to make search better,” he adds. “So this is another company trying out their idea – their philosophy, and we’ll just see how well it works.”

Below are a couple of interviews we did earlier this year with Blekko co-founder and CEO Rich Skrenta and DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg about their search engines. They give you an idea of their search philosophies:

Last week, Blekko announced some new privacy features, such as a new 48-hour data retention policy. Some users will like that either way.

Blekko’s policy even goes for logged-in users.

Other new privacy-related announcements from Blekko include:

- A new HTTPS Preferred system, which automatically points searchers at HTTPS (secure) websites in many cases

- SuperPrivacy and NoAds opt-out privacy settings allowing users to suppress ads and reduce logging of search keywords

“Blekko provides HTTPS on our own website, but that’s not enough to keep our users’ information private,” said Blekko CTO Greg Lindahl. “If you’re searching a website using insecure WiFi at a café and click on a non-HTTPS Wikipedia link in a search result, anyone nearby could observe what Wikipedia page you are accessing. They could also easily see the search terms you used. But this same search on blekko would ensure that when you click on the Wikipedia link you’ll be protected and your private information secure.”

“Search engines know too much about their users,” he added. “Our goal at blekko is to find a balance between retaining information to improve our search engine, and not retaining information that a user prefers to keep private.”

When Blekko first launched, CEO RIch Srkenta expressed bold aspirations for it to become “the third search engine” alongside Google and Bing. While it has a long way to go before it gets to that kind of status (in terms of both users and quality of search results, based on the image above), it’s clear that Blekko is aiming to differentiate itself from its competitors in more ways than one.

The human curation element of search that is the backbone of the search engine is obviously one way of doing that, and it continues to make other announcements like this – smaller things that some users may find appealing when comparing search engines.

Another example would be the recently launched deeper integration with Facebook. Or the banning of domains deemed to be content farms from search results – a hot issues considering the controversy that has accompanied the Google Panda update.