Blekko a $24 million venture backed project which has been in the making for over 3 years has been launched its pubic BETA version.  With this initial roll out Blekko are also releasing several new features for both mainstream and the sites super users.

Blekko is designed to eliminate spam searches using its proprietary slash tag technology. Basically the search engine checks all queries to see if they fall within one of seven main categories, health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels. Every search that is made that is recognised to be in one of these categories Blekko technology will assign the correct slash tag and display only results that are relevant to the search.

Webmasters and Blekko super users are able to apply slashtags to their URL’s so that Blekko can read them , this is aimed at stopping spam results such as huge link farms and bad neighborhood sites which are not maintained.

Don’t panic if your business does not fall within the initial seven categories, like our main keywords: ‘website design’, ‘Ecommerce Web Design‘, ‘social media’, ‘search engine optimisation’,etc…  Blekko has plans to release more as time goes on, they are just starting with the biggest traffic sites that are subject to poor / spam results.

Blekko has been testing this service with around 8,000 users who have created over 3,000 different slashtags. The stats so far are promising, 11% of the users come back on a weekly basis. CEO Rich Skrenta and Founder Mike Markson project that once the site hits one to two million queries per day, it can be profitable.

Yes there is more work for web owners to update their sites to feature, but in the end the end users experience is increased which is what it is all about.

The question is what will Google do in response?

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