We recently wrote on the Bing/Yahoo! merger deal which is Microsoft’s direct challenge to Google’s search engine and online advertising dominance. Just as that deal moves forward and North American Yahoo! users are now having Bing power their search results, a newcomer arrives, complete with Venture Capital funding.
So who is daft enough to take on Google and Microsoft at their own game?
Meet Mark Markson and Rich Skrenta, who have been putting their Blekko search engine together for the last 2½ years and have gone through 3 rounds of venture capital funding raising $20 million.
Let’s do the numbers – Google owns the search engine space with who cares how many billions of dollars; Microsoft’s online division has lost $4 billion in the last 2 years and was prepared to spend $46.5 billion on buying Yahoo! in 2008 just to attack that Google market.
So how far does $20 million bucks get you?
Not far, and especially not in an area where you cannot offer a reduced price for the service (searches are free) and how convenient is it going to be for users to navigate off their default search engine page to go to another search engine…it isn’t.
So What Gives?
The search engine and online advertising market is maturing and market shares are stabilizing; unless someone comes up with the so-called “Google Killer” and changes the search engine paradigm.
But Blekko denies they are a Google Killer, so what’s happening?
With market maturity comes a need to start differentiating your service offering and catering to the niche markets which emerge. You can be everything to everyone (Google and Bing), or you can aim to carve out a niche and take market share that way, which is exactly what Blekko is aiming at.
But that is only part of the story – remember those Venture Capitalists and their $20 million – they are looking for a payday and that means selling out, or more diplomatically, having an “exit strategy”.
So who will buy Blekko if it works – Google and Bing are obvious potential suitors with the cash mountain to buy whoever or whatever they want.
It all depends on whether Blekko really has “something” they want.
What is Different About Blekko
There are two distinct differences with Blekko:
- Slashtags – slashtags are a way of directing the search query to look at only a certain type of website; and
- Ranking – perform any search on Google or Bing and you get a search results page, but how do you know what was going on to get that search result? No-one knows for sure, but Blekko is transparent – ask it why you got a particular rank and it tells you!
Slashtags
This is the USP from the user perspective; if you are voting for McCain in the Arizona Senate elections then you may only be interested in what the conservative sites have to say on the election, but you can’t readily do that with Google.
With Blekko you can:
John McCain election/conservative
John McCain election/Arizona
John McCain election/liberal
The three search queries above are examples of slashtag use – the first search term with the slashtag /conservative will search only those websites deemed to be “conservative”; /Arizona will only search on websites deemed to be connected to Arizona e.g. Arizona bloggers or newspapers; and /liberal will search sites which are going to give you the opposition view to how McCain is getting on with his re-election efforts.
You can create your own slashtags or use preset ones already created for you by Blekko and other users. There are drawbacks, such as who is maintaining the website lists supporting slashtags, but the search engine is not on general release yet and is still in testing beta, though you can gain access by following Blekko on Twitter – just follow Blekko and send a message to @Blekko. There are also some presets, known as “built-in” slashtags which include
- /noporn;
- /date; and
- /rank.
/noporn search is obvious enough, while /date ranks results in date order (which is useful – Google & Co still have not resolved dating and historical searches yet).
It is the /rank slashtag which is a very welcome change, but more of that in a moment.
Blekko is letting you specify what part of the web you want to look at for information, and you can create your own customized lists of sites to make it even more specific. I can see a lot of application in this and not least, a greatly improved level of relevancy to users and that is the Holy Grail for search engines of any color.
Ranking Transparency
Using the /rank slashtag uncovers a lot of information which is very granular and tells you exactly why Blekko is ranking you where you are at.
Getting ranked on page 1 of Google is fantastic, but it’s like winning a prize without being told which competition you entered.
Getting ranked anywhere on Blekko comes with an explanation of why – total transparency.
Using the /rank slashtag provides the information on how Blekko has applied its search algorithm, so now if you are deficient in one SEO area you know where you need to improve. At the same time it is telling you what you are good at, which lets you gain some idea of how important certain SEO activities are compared to others and what value for your SEO dollars is being gained.
While Blekko does not tell you what is happening with the Bing or Google algorithm, it is a refreshing change from all the secrecy and smoke which is blown around how search engines do what they do. More than this, using Blekko’s transparency should, to an extent, help to gauge how effective specific components of your SEO strategy are in gaining high rankings with Bing and Google.
Takeaway
The search engine market is maturing and differentiation in service provision is going to become the norm. Google and Bing will slug it out for market dominance, but there is an opportunity for niche market’s to be carved out of the turf.
Blekko is doing just that with a search engine service which allows you to “spin” the web – effectively you tell it what areas of the web to search or not, and this will make for a greater degree of relevancy for individual users.
Blekko is also transparent in that it tells you why a site gets the ranking awarded to it. Now why don’t Google and Bing follow that example?
