i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Recently launched, Blekko, a new search engine, is attempting to provide users with better search results. Currently, when individuals search the web, they have to sort through various sites in order to find 'trustworthy' information. According to Rick Skrenta, CEO and co-founder of Blekko,'the web is filling up with spam and low-rent webpages from content farms like Demand Media, saying the web now has 100 billion urls, most created by bots.'

To help users retrieve useful information, Blekko  has 'curated' a number websites by categorizing them under certain topics (e.g 'recipe'). Called 'slash tags', Blekko encourages user to add a slash tag after their original search word(s). For example, when searching for a pumpkin pie recipe, the user types in pumpkin pie, followed by '/recipe', which is the slash tag. The slash tag helps returns websites that is not only approved by humans, but also returns sites relating to just that topic. Ideally, searches at Bleeko can be more precise and trustworthy compared to Google or Bing.  Users will know to trust these websites because they have been approved and placed under a specific category.

Currently, Blekko has hundreds of slash tags, which were developed with the help of 8,000 volunteers. I wonder what kind of vocabulary problem and biases people ran into, and how the issue was resolved. I also wonder how Bleeko decided what the authoritative word to use to represent each slash tag. Instead of relying on just algorithms,  Blekko's approach also emphasizes the human element: people need to be involved in the process since we understand what is meaningful/trustworthy or spam, thus  we can help create useful search results. This reminds me of the Google news algorithm, which was discussed during the Classification lecture. Google news is currently unable to distinguish stories that are from different point of views. With Blekko, sites are tagged from different points of views (e.g conservative, liberal), so users are able to look up  issues of global warming from a liberal's point-of-view (global warming / liberal) without having to weed through conservative opinions.

However, Bleeko recognizes that not every website has been categorized with a slash tag. As a result, useful, but obscure websites might not appear. Instead of returning nothing, Blekko, using its algorithim, will do a global search on the web, returning content that has not yet been categorized with a slash tag.

Lastly, Blekko encourages users to created their own slashtags for their own use, as well as for community use. I am sure Blekko's tags will have the same vocabulary problems that flickr has, and I am curious to see how/ if Blekko will deal with the problem.

Article: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/blekko-launches/