Blekko: Should Google be Worried?
I read today that Co-founder of Topix, Rich Skrenta is looking at taking on Google with new search engine, Blekko. I discussed this with a few people at work today and the response seems to be very negative. The responses I got: “Sif!”…”As if anyone can compete with Google”. To be critical of yet another so-called competitor of Google, I believe, is rational. It’s been tried before and giants like Yahoo! and Live haven’t even managed it. So what is so good about Blekko?
Well, one of the problems I think Skrenta and his team are trying to fix is when you type in a word like “Kylie Minogue” you get many pages of results: images, news, scholar, books, et al. Not to mention the hundreds of pages of search results. I feel, Blekko is trying to achieve a more integrated Google. One page and summaries of what you actually need (want) to know. And apparently no PageRank algorithm.
I’m really excited to see what Blekko has in-store. I am, admittedly a Google-aholic but I am also open to better ways of doing things. For example, I am looking at making the move from iGoogle as my home page to PageFlakes as the latter looks and moves a lot better, whilst still being integrated with the likes of Gmail.
Apparently, Blekko will not be live until 2009. At the moment by going to the domain you get a picture of some cute, puppet-looking creature. I wonder how cute and fun Blekko is going to be…
If I were Google I would certainly be concerned by the rise of so many alternative search engines. I think it shows that search has a long way to go before it gives us what we really want: instant accurate answers to any question imaginable.
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia has said “Search is broken” and he is working on a search engine (I think they were calling it a semantic search engine. I’m not 100% sure what that means though).
The big threat in my opinion though (and I may be wrong) is Swicki by Eurekster.
A swicki is a subject-specific social search engine. So let’s say you like widgets, you can start a swicki about widgets. The Swicki will return only widget related results. AND the users can vote and comment on the results.
Functionally it is like a merger of Google and Digg.