Blekko is a new search engine that’s entering a market dominated by Google with the intention of creating a good reputation giving search tools more sophisticated but in some ways simpler to use.

One of the bases of Blekko searches is the slashtag: basically it’s possible to make a certain search restricting its results adding to the keywords a slash (“/”) and a tag word. For example if I want to look for a topic restricting the search to blogs I can use the slashtag /blogs. The basic idea is to have really useful results, leaving out spam or advertisment sites.

[ad name=”eBayMale468″]

Blekko’s search results are accompanied by various additional information and functions, some of which can be used only creating a Blekko account and logging in:

• tag: allows to add tags to the associated page
• seo: allows to see a seo mini-analisys of the associated page
• links: allows to see which pages contain a link to the associated page
• cache: allows to see a version of the associated page present in the Blekko cache memory
• IP: putting the mouse cursor on this function you can see the IP for the associated page
• adsense: the associated page contains Google ads and putting the mouse cursor on this function you can see the user Google AdSense ID
• chatter: allows to add a comment to the associated page
• spam: allows to mark the associated page as spam

Some information can be easily found but Blekko makes them available in a very immediate way. Those data though are generally more useful to people interested in making an SEO analysis of the page than to people who make normal searches.

Concerning the possibility to add tags and comments it’s a community style approach to try and enrich the results quality giving the users opinions coming from people who already surfed among the pages just found.

[ad name=”Google Adsense 468″]

My impression is that Blekko decided to offer search functions that can be of interest to expert users to build a community of a certain level that for the momenti might ensure its survival in a very tough market. This makes sense considering the fact that the project founder is the ex CEO of NewHoo/DMOZ, the community driven web directory though there are more and more doubts about its operations as updates look slower and slower while its importance gets lower and lower. If Blekko wants to be successful it must succed in keeping an active community to be able to keep on supplying more  contents than its opponents, Google in particular.