Making Web searches more useful

TechCrunch suggests that Google is now so swamped with spam that it's almost useless as a means to find the information we want. There may be a better alternative.

Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search.

We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko. It’s a new technology and is far from perfect; but it is innovative and fills the vacuum of competition with Google (and Bing).

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In addition to providing regular search capabilities like Google’s, Blekko allows you to define what it calls “slashtags” and filter the information you retrieve according to your own criteria. Slashtags are mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic, such as health, finance, sports, tech, and colleges. So if you are looking for information about swine flu, you can add “/health” to your query and search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands spam sites. Blekko crowdsources the editorial judgment for what should and should not be in a slashtag, as Wikipedia does. One Blekko user created a slashtag for 2100 college websites. So anyone can do a targeted search for all the schools offering courses in molecular biology, for example. Most searches are like this—they can be restricted to a few thousand relevant sites. The results become much more relevant and trustworthy when you can filter out all the garbage.

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Blekko makes an effort to index the page by the date on which it was actually created (by analyzing other information embedded in its HTML). So if I want to search for articles that mention my name, I can do a regular search; sort the results chronologically; limit them to tech blog sites or to any blog sites for a particular year; and perhaps find any references related to the subject of economics. Try doing any of this in Google or Bing.

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The bottom line is that we’re fighting a losing battle for the web and need alternative ways of finding the information that we need. I hope that Blekko and a new breed of startups fill this void: that they do to Google what Google did to the web in the late 90’s — clean up the spam and clutter.

There's more at the link. Here's a video introduction to Blekko.

Looks like a promising start. I'll use it for a while, and if I like it, I'll report back on my experiences. I have to agree with TechCrunch - I'm getting awfully tired of spam sites popping up on Google searches! There are even companies offering optimization tools to help your Web site show up better in response to users' search queries on Google. When things have gone that far, it means one can't rely on a search to return honest answers . . . and it's time that changed. I hope Blekko gets it right, and that others follow.

Peter