NOTE: I wrote this post a decade ago. Blekko doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve left this up for your interest. The links no longer exist, therefore, I have un-linked them.

Blekko is a new search engine (as of November, 2010) that has some helpful features that makes it different and more interesting than its competitors, Google and Bing.  Yeah, Blekko probably won’t take over Google or Bing but Blekko has stated it would be happy to be in third place. And I think it deserves that spot even coming right out of the gate.

Blekko Slashtags

Let’s look at just one of its many cool features: the slashtag.  Pay attention to the slashtag tool because I think it will become important for SEO experts to know how to utilize this tool in optimizing web pages.  Here’s one reason why: You can search through heavily spammed categories by “slashing” through with a slashtag. If you move quickly now, while Blekko is still “young” and new to the search scene, you can get a corner on the market by creating your own slashtags. You have to create your free account on Blekko before you can use its tools, so, as soon as you’ve read this post, go do it.

Slashtag: “Slashtag search lets users slash in what they want and slash out what they don’t. Knock out the spam sites and search only the sites you want to search,” according to Blekko’s help section. Here’s a slashtag to search ONLY satire pertaining to “Barack Obama”:

You can create your own slashtags by going to this link: http://blekko.com/tag/add

Screenshot:

You can follow other people’s slashtags and also keep your slashtags private so no one can follow yours. It’s fun to search another user’s slashtags to see what they’re keeping tabs on. Here’s how:

“If you want to search all the slashtags of a user, as opposed to any one of that user’s individual slashtags, just append their user name as a slashtag to your search. So for instance, searching “Pittsburgh steelers /mike” searches all of user mike’s slashtags for the term “pittsburgh steelers”, not any of his individual slashtags.” -Blekko

To save you some time of figuring out what slashtags exist so far, Blekko has created a list: http://blekko.com/tag/show?t=3

Here are five reasons why Blekko says you should create slashtags:

1. Verticals with just YOUR favorite sites:
   u2 /music, iphone reviews /tech, wine /buy, 2010 season /steelers, American Idol /tv
2. Search you can’t do with keywords:
   global warming /conservative, ufos /paranormal, congress /humor, Kim Kardashian /gossip
3. Slash through heavily spammed categories:
   avoiding swine flu /health, iphone 4 reviews /techblogs, Aruba /travel, low calorie /diet
4. Access to recent material and web data:
   Obama /date, Mel Gibson /rank, cnn.com /seo, techcrunch.com /links
5. Direct access to 3rd party api’s:
   US Open /youtube, Twilight /twitter, Moby Dick /amazon, sports car /shop

Study up some more on this by heading over to Blekko’s help section and slash away. Let me know what you think about this cool and highly beneficial search tool by sharing your comment here.