New Search Engine Blekko Launches, Relies on Users

REDWOOD, Calif. — Blekko, a new search engine modeled after Wikipedia, has launched.

The company said instead of relying on fully-automated searches, Blekko will depend on human input to develop, modify and edit search options and the results are divided into seven categories that represent the highest volume of search traffic.

Under construction for the past three years and designed as an alternative to Bing and Google, Blekko will take a turn at eliminating spam from search results on the Internet with the open-search, user-based system.

"We realized we could make web tools that let users sign up and help make the search engine better," Blekko chief executive Rich Skrenta said.

"If we opened up the process, we could not only get orders of magnitude more people involved than we could ever hope to employ, we could also create an open, accountable process around the search engine relevance data. "

According to the company, Blekko will use live people to create slashtags and web pages generated into groups by specific topics. The Blekko's website defines slashtags as tools that will search only the sites you want and cut out the spam sites.

“Bing and Google have hundreds of contractors that use web tools to refine this relevance data — classifying porn, spam, domain parks, e-commerce sites, fake 404's, markov-spam, official sites and so on," Skrenta said.

The company said its goal is to identify the 50 best sites on the Internet in top search categories.

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