It has been a while since I have published a Blekko-related article, and since this quality search engine recently underwent an update to its service, I thought it would be apropos to communicate this to you because Blekko is a great alternative search engine to use.

Last week, Blekko announced and unveiled new changes to their search engine design and indexing, along with adding slashtags to 500+ categories. The team at Blekko had the following to say about its mission for the upcoming year:

“As we head into 2012, our mission at blekko is more important than ever. If you think about it, prior to the internet the newspaper was the offline equivalent of the search engine. It was the starting spot where people went to get their news, job listings, personals, movies listings, classifieds, etc. Competing editorial voices were a hallmark of competition in the newspaper business and readers benefited because they had choice.”

Blekko explains, in following points (paraphrazed below), the reasons for the recent enhancements to their search engine:

  • Quality – We purposefully bias our index away from sites with low-quality content.
  • Source-based, not-link based ranking – Regardless of how many people link to healthspamsite.com, we believe sites like the Mayo Clinic, NIH.gov, etc. are better sites. On blekko, brands trump links.
  • Spam Free – Blekko hates spam. We want users to get their information from quality sites designed to inform, not to just monetize.
  • Human Curation – Their are subject matter experts in the community who will know more about specific topics than anyone in this office or any other office for that matter. We want to include these experts in our search experience, not to exclude them.
  • Open and Transparent – Blekko makes freely available to its users all of the data that provide the underpinning of our search results.

What is your opinion of the recently updated Blekko? Please feel free to leave your feedback below in this post’s comments section.