Blekko Launches a Search Engine With Bias

Pickens writes "Previous specialized search engines including Cuil, Hakia, Powerset, Clusty, and RedZ — each had a special trick, but they've all faded from memory, some after crashing in flames, some after making their founders rich. Now Rafe Needleman reports at Cnet that along comes Blekko, whose claim to fame is that you can tilt your search results in the direction you like by using a category of bias, like 'liberal' or 'conservative.' Categorization lists are applied by appending a 'slashtag.' The query, 'climate change /conservative' will give you politically slanted results, for example. 'Climate change /science' will restrict your results to hits from scientific Web sites. Blekko won't have a real, Web-wide impact unless its concept — that bias is good and more aggressive search filtering is needed — gets some traction, writes Needleman. But 'Blekko is a solid alternative to Google and Bing for anyone, and more importantly it's got great potential for researchers, librarians, journalists, or anyone who's willing to put some work into how their search engine functions in order to get better results.'"

Comments

Kittens

[RabbitWho]

This has been my home page for a while. (You can get invites from their twitter). What sold me was kittens /liberal vs kittens /conservative

Needs Work; Selling Point Doesn't Exist for Me

[eldavojohn]

... for example. "Climate change /science" will restrict your results to hits from scientific Web sites.

Massive failure on that example unless you consider the top three results (newscientist.com, livescience.com and physorg.com) to be more than just news sites. And (of course you new this was coming) the gold standard does a better job with the same search.

Of the first page of Blekko results, I'd argue that only half of them have any business being on there. The other problem is that a lot of things like date ranges or news that this slashtag hopes to fill is already covered by Google's advanced notation. People who need these have probably already learned to use them (for instance the site:slashdot.org term helps me see if a story has already been up on a topic). If you want a bias other than range restrictions, just add it as a search term.

I spent a lot of time playing around with this and nothing I tried really jumped out at me as "useful." Of course I was just fiddling around and not really looking for anything in particular.

politically biased searches for the win!

[Shakrai]

Obamacare fiscal implications /liberal = Will save us trillions!
WMDs in Iraq /neo-con = We'll find them on every street corner!
Sex education /catholic = Condoms don't prevent AIDS
Gun control /bloomberg = We need tougher gun laws because criminals follow them
How to give a concession speech /howard dean = YEEEEEEAAAAAAH!
Unbiased news /conservative = Fox News
Unbiased news /liberal = MSNBC
Unbiased news = No results round.