The Side Note

Alternative search engine relies on Slashtags

Bing TV Ad - Search Engine Overload

I’ve always enjoyed the TV ads for Bing, they focus on one of my biggest frustrations with search engines – the superfluous, unrelated information delivered as search results.  Bing was the first alternative search engine focused on providing better search results. Although, once the deal with Yahoo! was finalized, it can be argued that they are courting the same advertising dollars as Google – as evidenced with the Bing PPC guidelines.

Google addressed the issue with the launch of Google Instant in September. It allows me to refine my search terms dynamically.  Now, comes a new search engine, Blekko, currently in beta. This search engine encourages the use of slashtags to reduce spam.

Basically, a slashtag filters search results by limiting the sites that are searched.  The slashtag mirrors the popular Twitter hashtag and if slashtags catch on, search could be significantly changed.

Here’s a quick example of the slashtag “/”:

If you select a topic that has a lot of content covered from many viewpoints, you can use the hashtag to identify the viewpoint you wish to find.  If your subject is “global warming”, you can use the slashtag /liberal or /conservative and get distinctly different results.

• Global warming /liberal returns results from the Center for American Progress and Huffington Post.
• Global warming /conservative returns results from the National Center for Public Policy and Fox News.

Since the more traditional search engines do not provide results ranked by journalistic integrity, the searcher has to wade through content returned driven from SEO-centric sites that aggregate content without regard to reputation, credibility or integrity. The flood of second-rate, SEO-driven content is an opportunity for a search engines that eliminate spam.

This leads to a series of interesting questions that will impact future marketing decisions:

• Will Blekko gain traction outside the tech community?
• Will slashtags impact search engine optimization techniques?
• Will the public change behavior and type a symbol prior to searching for a topic?
• Are the searches really better than what I can get with Google?

Blekko acknowledges that it is still in the embryonic stages. That is partially why it still in its beta stage. “This is just the beginning.  We wanted to put out a base set of features, but we can think of lots of ways to work with our users to improve search,” said Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta.

Tell us if you think there is an opportunity for a new search engine or are we already saturated, and if you think the slashtag is an innovation or just too late to make a difference. You can find Weise Communications on Facebook and follow @Weise_Ideas on Twitter.