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.

“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.”

"We did see a big surge in traffic following our announcement that we banned the top 20 content farms," he says. "We’ve had a lot of positive reaction to that from web users who are tired of seeing poor quality content in their search results."  

"These new users are glad we’ve taken a stand and are checking the site out," he adds. "I don’t have stats yet on how many new slashtags they may have made yet, though."

Blekko issued a metrics release today, looking at how many slashtags have been created since launch, as well as total search queries in January – an all time high. Blekko users have created over 110,000 slashtags since the company’s November launch, and the search engine saw over 30 million search queries on the site in January with user activity for the month averaging between 10 to 15 queries per second. While Blekko saw a small dip in queries after an all time high at launch, current search levels are now greater than the initial launch pop, the company says. 

"We’re happy at how quickly users have adopted the idea of a new search engine and have created so many quality slashtags just three months since launch," Skrenta said. "Our call to rid the Web of spam has been heard loud and clear by many and we encourage our community to continue to slash the spam." 

Below are a couple of recent interviews we did with Skrenta on webspam and Blekko:

More WebProNews Videos

More WebProNews Videos

As Skrenta was on the panel with Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Harry Shum last week, in which those two argued about the whole Bing-copying-search-results debate, we asked Skrenta for his take on the matter, but he wouldn’t comment on that. 

As DuckDuckGo has started hard wiring in wikiHow content as its top results for how-to queries, we asked if Blekko would ever consider such a move and whether Blekko had been approached by wikiHow. His response was simply, "We haven’t been approached by wikiHow." 

Blekko does say that it will add to its list of 20 blocked sites as necessary.

We asked Blekko just how it is defining spam from this Spam Clock, and co-founder and CEO Rich Skrenta gave us a pretty long explanation of Blekko’s philosophy on the subject. "The web has gone from 1 billion pages to 100 billion pages in the past 10 years," he tells us. "This is enormous growth. But what are all these pages?  Does it make sense that the web is that big?"

Skrenta refers to a paper from some Microsoft researchers talking about how big the "useful" web is, finding that over a period of a year and a half, the total number of pages that searches using msn search ever went to was only 550 million.  "Not even 1 billion," says Skrenta.

"Then they started working through the math on whether this made sense," he explains. "We tend to think of Wikipedia as a huge encyclopedia. It is – it’s thousands of times larger than Britannica ever was.  But English Wikipedia is only 3.5 million articles. And the growth has slowed. Why has the growth slowed?  Because people don’t want to edit Wikipedia anymore? No. It’s because it’s DONE. It already has a page about everything. Aardvarks and the Amazon and acetaminophen and Australia. The world has to make new things, people and events so Wikipedia can add pages for them."

"This is true for other categories of things people might look for," says Skrenta. "There are only 70,000 total titles in the Netflix catalog. There are about 350,000 cities in the world of note. There are about 8 million total products available through Amazon. 15 million US businesses. Millions, not billions."

"Even if you add in 550 million Facebook users and 150 twitter users, you’re still not [at] a billion," he adds. "Add in every tweet and every Facebook status update and you’re still in the low billions. So what are all these 100 billion URLs? And unlike Wikipedia, whose growth has leveled off, the web’s growth is increasing," says Skrenta. "The reason is that it cost[s] virtually nothing to make thousands or millions of new pages, and pages that catch search traffic make money."

So that would appear to be Blekko’s mindset on the state of the web, and the reason the company is betting on community to control search relevancy using the search engine’s slashtag method (More on this here). 

"Our approach was to model what we expected the growth in the web to look like over the next year, and after applying a discount for the legitimate pages, to count the rest as useless garbage," says Skrenta. "More new copies of Wikipedia, more markov-chain generated spam blogs, more copies of the InfoUSA and Axciom business datasets clogging the web, more fake review sites with Mechanical Turk authored posts."

We still don’t know exactly what is being "discounted for the legitimate pages". Certainly, there’s a wide range of valuable content between the sites Skrenta mentions and what could widely be considered spam, but proportionally, is Blekko right? 

"The numbers are rough, but we can boil it down to approximately 90% of the (very conservatively estimated) 10 billion pages that will be added to the web over the next year to be spam," he says. "That works out to about a million pages an hour. Frankly this is probably under-counting the spam given the growth in spam tweets and fake Facebook accounts, but it’s mainly for illustrative purposes, so the round number worked."

"The massive flooding of the web with endless copies and permutations and shadows of existing things is what is pulling the rug out from under link-based search rankings," Skrenta concludes. "Links don’t represent a human voting on the quality of a site anymore."

Whether or not Blekko finds mainstream success as a search engine, this is why social has become such an important factor in search relevancy, and why the major search engines have continued to move in this direction. It’s about trust. 

What do you think of Blekko’s evaluation of the web? Share your thoughts here.

Discussion about Blekko on our Facebook page.

"This new search vertical includes only human selected, reputable shopping sites and is designed to fight off spammers and malware distributors for online shoppers this holiday season," a representative for Blekko tells WebProNews. While it’s a bit late in the day, it is Cyber Monday, so it’s a pretty good day for such a feature. 

First of all, it helps to be familiar with how Blekko works, so if you’re not, watch our recent interview with co-founder and CEO Rich Skrenta who explains it:

More WebProNews Videos

"Any user can go to Blekko today and just add /safeshop to their search, ensuring they get results only from the most trusted online stores," the rep says. "Blekko is also inviting web users to help edit the /safeshop slashtag and to add additional trusted outlets to the search vertical."

Does the crowd equal trust though? 

"All of the sites selected for this tag [are] selected by humans," Blekko cofounder and VP, Marketing Mike Markson tells WebProNews. "As we add in more editors, we will log all of their activity – the sites they add, the ones they delete, etc. – that way they are subject to the review of the community in general, and the editors of the slashtag in particular. It’s very similar to the Wikipedia model – if you log every change, the community can police and keep it accurate. It’s the direct human involvement, not just counting links, that keeps this tag trustworthy."

"It seems more important than ever that we work together to create a really great holiday shopping search experience that weeds out the online Grinches who want to steal, rather than give during the holidays," said Skrenta. "Algorithmic search is sinking. Web users collectively will be able to build a holiday shopping search experience that protects consumers."

We have seen a couple instances today that would suggest a bit of a human touch in search could be just what the doctor ordered. You may have read about Google giving high rankings to a business getting tons of negative reviews or how Bing’s new Artist Pages for musicians leave a bit to be desired in the content department. Either of these problems could be solved by some good old fashioned human editing (which Google apparently did, as the business in question stopped ranking so well after the exposure it got from a New York Times article). 

Whether it’s avoiding going to a business that doesn’t treat its customers well, avoiding misinformation or just plain irrelevant information or avoiding malware, it’s becoming more and more clear that people can’t trust algorithms alone. Sometimes people need people, and this seems to be the whole reason for Blekko’s existence, and why Skrenta sees it as the "third search engine" (with Google and Bing being the other two). 

In fact, Blekko even alludes to the Google incident in its announcement, saying, "Other search engines that rely solely on algorithmic ranking have recently been called out for promoting sites that offer consumers a poor experience. Perversely, these sites have found that negative attention can help them gain additional promotion in algorithmic search results. Blekko’s /safeshop slashtag fixes this by limiting results to only trusted online sellers."

Blekko claims to have thousands of slashtags in the bank already, created by thousands of human editors. The company also launched "auto-fired slashtag searches" in seven categories that are most often targeted by spammers. For these, Blekko says it returns results only from the most trusted information sources from sites that have been inspected for quality by volunteer editors.

The biggest issue for Blekko moving forward, will likely be managing the public’s trust in its editors (well, that and penetrating the market dominated by Google and to a lesser extent Bing). Skrenta was also the co-founder of what became DMOZ, and that has been largely criticized over the years for its editorial process. The search engine is bound to attract criticism from webmasters of sites who don’t make the cut for certain slashtags, who feel they should. That’s just part of the game though. It will be very interesting to watch Blekko’s progression.

 Ask is dead, IMHO Ask had a much better product they just were never effective at communicating that to the public, so they floundered and Barry Diller wasn’t patient enough to wait long term. So all that traffic goes to Google … ding bump for Google right there.

AOL … really does anybody other than your grandma use AOL? They had an interesting product with Netscape Propeller social voting site, unfortunately they ignored it and now it’s overrun by spammers.

Hakia interesting but UI is awful and confusing [lcd tv].

Quintura I love the associated word cloud on the right, but again for most people the UI is intimidating [blackberry curve].

Wikia … really … ok fine [at & t tilt] … first result a poker site … see what I mean do we even have a word for pre alpha?

Now we have to try and play a little guessing game lets go the microhoo route first. It’s going to take 18-24 months for those two 800 pound gorillas to get through enough meetings and coordination to a) figure who’s staying and going b) who’s running search c) what platform they are using d) how to merge the existing technologies e) planning a new strategy to adapt to the market changes and Google enhancements that occurred in the time it took them to get this far.

OK what if they don’t merge, Yahoo as whole has no vision or leadership, the captain isn’t boldly going where no man has gone before, he’s looking for a safe port to hole up during the storm. A lack of leadership and vision and it trickles down. Oh and cutting employees, never fills them with the inspiration to rise up to the challenge, it’s demoralizing … been there done that.

Microsoft, again what are you doing to innovate and change the landscape? Where is your leadership in the search market? Nobody associates MSN with a leading edge search engine, it’s an online media portal. Maybe people will hate vista so much they’ll be able to release another OS and force a large segment of the population to reset their default search engines again … unless they break down and finally buy a Mac.

I want to see what Rich Skrenta is working on but we’re a few years away …

Sure it the numbers may not technically add up to 90% but then I’ve never been big on bean counters anyway. Google may not have 90% or more market share but it sure will feel like it. Google remains the only search engine cultivating brand loyalty and evangelists among the digerati. With Ask out of the way, there’s no innovation, the others are all reactionary and playing catchup … my two cents.

Comments

Skrenta’s disdain for what search has become with Google dominance has been well-documented. He talked about beating Google in March 2007, saying the dominant search engine is "unassailable in its core domain."

He suggested an approach similar to vertical search might work, but it will need "a great product and a strong new brand." In his post about Blekko, Skrenta hinted at how he’ll go about taking on the world of search:

I’ve come away with the idea that editorial differentiation is possible. But the editorial voice of a search engine is in the index…so it has to be algorithmic editorial differentiation.

Google and it’s copy-tition were designed 10 years ago. But the web has changed significantly in the past decade. Google was built to index a web that no longer exists.

TechCrunch had a little more about Skrenta’s startup. A public prototype of Blekko is at least a year away, with Skrenta aiming for part of the bigger engine’s market share.

"Normally an entrepreneur announcing they’re taking on Google with a six person team and just $2 million in funding would either be laughed at or ignored," Michael Arrinigton wrote. "In Skrenta’s case, he has proven himself more than once as capable of taking on big challenges and winning."

Taking on and beating Google is a lofty goal. If Blekko can get close to the top five, it will be a multi-billion dollar success story.

The challenge of topping Google has changed from the time when Google wiped away AltaVista and everyone else in the search space when it launched. No company had Google’s scale when that happened, not in search or contextual advertising.

It’s not impossible that a better product could come along and provide a better search experience than Google. Getting to a higher scale means changing an ingrained habit of "Googling" by Internet users. Altering the mindset that leads one to search Google may be a bigger task than creating a better algorithm.

It hasn’t been very long since Topix moved from a focus on news aggregation to a more local search/community orientation. Although Skrenta led the company through that change and beyond, Tolles will take over from here.

Tolles discussed the changeover at the Topix blog. Though all is going well at Topix, including a place in the Hitwise top 20 news & info sites for May 2007, Skrenta evidently did not relish the role of being more of a salesman than a coder:

Rich told me that he wasn’t having as much fun right now, and looking at what we needed to do, didn’t see much opportunity for what he really loves to do — architect from the metal on up and put out the 1.0 that is so far ahead of everything else – the first computer virus, one of the first MUD’s, NewHoo/dmoz, Topix – that even his no good co-founders couldn’t screw things up. No, we had just deployed the big new re-invention, and now it’s time to keep tweaking it, and also push up the marketing and sales efforts a couple of notches. Rich would rather chew off his arm, I think.

Skrenta won’t have to look for the salt and pepper, though. Tolles will report to him, but the real day to day duties will be on Tolles’ shoulders. That leaves Skrenta some freedom to cook up something new. Perhaps his recent blog post about social networking provided a peek into Skrenta’s latest interest.

Letter to the editor of the local paper? Meh. I can be the editor on Topix and write my own letters. And publish them, where other people can comment and edit them. It’s a whole community cycle that dispenses with the century-old tradition of sending one’s mad rantings to the newspaper editor, who would either publish or dump them.

Topix was successful before the change. CEO Rich Skrenta said so on his Skrentablog in discussing the site, and why it had to change:

We took a hard look at ourselves at Topix last year. We had built up a strong local audience on the site, but a lot of it was SEO, and while users were clearly getting some value out of our product, we hadn’t made something that people really cared about. As cool a technical trick as our aggregated geolocalized news pages were, they actually pretty much sucked.

Making Topix into something people cared more about wasn’t going to be a quick trip to Clonesville to pick up a copy of Digg or MySpace, according to Skrenta. “I don’t believe that you can win by making a clone of something else,” he wrote.

Part of that change meant a $1 million domain change. As of now, Topix.com gets the love, while the long-running, familiar Topix.net will eventually slide into being a redirected URL, but not until the search engines pick up the dot com domain in a satisfactory manner. Skrenta may not be SEO’s biggest fan, but he seems to recognize its importance.

The official word at the Topix blog said people will be able to participate in the system just as Wikipedia editors do with that online encyclopedia. Anyone will be able to submit stories to Topix editors; if a locale does not have one, then the automated RoboBlogger will handle those duties.

About a hundred editors drawn from the ranks of Tribune, Gannett, and McClatchy journalists will edit and moderate the content arriving on Topix. That can even be remote content, a wise choice by Topix in an age when it seems like everyone has a cameraphone in a pocket; send it to the editors by emailing the story to zipcode@topix.com.

Beating The Unbeatable Google

Choose your poison: Google in search or Google in advertising. If you’ve ever heard of the phrase "Hobson’s choice", picking a competitive ground with Google looks more like no choice at all.

Skrenta thinks differently, even though it was he who suggested Google is the environment a couple of months back. His most recent thoughts on beating Google read more like a primer of why it can’t be done head to head.

"A conventional attack against Google’s search product will fail," Skrenta said. "They are unassailable in their core domain."

Kind of tosses the ‘how to beat Google’ theme out the window straightaway.

"You need both a great product and a strong new brand," he writes. "Both are hard problems."

The shoemaker Nike demonstrated this. Over the years as Phil Knight and company built the brand, it took quite a while before they were confident enough to put the swoosh on their products like hats and shirts without the word ‘Nike’.

So you can’t beat Google on search. You can’t beat them on brand; Google is a dictionary word that to Internet users means search. It’s like traveling in the South and ordering a soda at lunchtime. Everything is a Coke, even if it’s a Sprite or a Mr. Pibb.

Where next? Skrenta suggested the vertical approach without coming out and calling it that:

You need to position your product to sub-segment the market and carve out a new niche. Or better, define an entirely new category. See Ries on how to launch a new brand into a market owned by a competitor. If it can be done in Ketchup or Shampoo, it can be done in search.

Google came about as many people sought to solve a great problem of the rapidly growing Internet with search. Once Google emerged by doing what people wanted – giving them a quality result immediately – most competitors fell by the wayside. Yahoo is the closest and they still trail Google by roughly 20 percent in the US search market.

That’s general web search. Vertical search has become a rising field; witness the heated competition and product launches in the local search segment alone. Healthcare stands out with sites like Kosmix and Healthline delving into quality resources for their search results.

That’s sub-segmenting the market. Skrenta nails the wisdom needed here by observing "The editorial value of search is in the index, not the interface." Google has proven that less is more with a minimalist approach.

Keeping that approach in mind goes along with Skrenta’s later points: users tend to want to type two words in a box, and they aren’t interested in fancy-schmancy "clusters, or tags, or categories, or directory tabs, or pulldowns. Ever."

Beating Google? Probably not going to happen right away. The winners in search will probably be the hyper-focused verticals, which makes sense. When creating an online business, entrepreneurs try to fill a niche. Search should work out the same way.