Blekko search engine with a human touch

A small Silicon Valley company with some big name backers has released a test version of a new search engine that the company says has a key ingredient that is missing from Google, the human touch.

According to Blekko, the Web has increasingly become saturated with spam-like websites, specially designed to pop up in Google's search results but whose content is heavier on marketing pitches than substantive information.

The remedy, Blekko Chief Executive Rich Skrenta told Reuters, is to narrow searches to groups of websites that people, not computers, have pre-approved as being the best sources of information for particular topics.

The approach is decidedly old-school in an industry where computer algorithms developed by engineers at Google and Microsoft Corp have for years been considered the ideal way to find information in the sea of online data.

Blekko has raised $ 24 million in funding as it has developed its product over the past three years, with angel investors including Marc Andreessen, the creator of the first Web browser, and Ron Conway, who has invested in tech companies including Twitter, Foursquare and even Google.

Blekko joins a long list of search engines that have tried to improve upon Google's business, with a less-than-stellar track record. Cuil, a high-profile search engine launched by former Google employees in 2008, quietly shut down in September; Powerset, a search engine that let people ask questions in plain English, was acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

Greg Sterling, an Internet consultant and a contributing editor for the online blog Search Engine Land, said he doesn't expect that Blekko will displace Google any time soon. But he said the company has developed a creative approach to search that might become popular as a secondary search engine for certain types of queries.

In an emailed statement, Google said that it welcomes competition that helps users get useful information and gives people new choices. "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space-it makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day everyone benefits from that," said Google.

Blekko is launching with a special directory of websites that can provide spam-free results in seven general search categories: health, recipes, song lyrics, hotels, automobiles, colleges and personal finance.

Blekko also allows users to create their own personal directories of websites for any topic, so that the search engine only looks for information from sources the user deems relevant or trustworthy.

The focus on quality websites over quantity has appeal, said Sterling. "We don't care if there are 30 million results or 40 million results, it's really 'Give me the information I need in an efficient way so I don't have to go wading through all this nonsense'," he said.

Common search engine principles

To understand seo you need to be aware of the architecture of search engines. They all contain the following main components:

Spider - a browser-like program that downloads web pages.

Crawler – a program that automatically follows all of the links on each web page.

Indexer - a program that analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider and the crawler.

Database– storage for downloaded and processed pages.

Results engine– extracts search results from the database.

Web server – a server that is responsible for interaction between the user and other search engine components.

Specific implementations of search mechanisms may differ. For example, the Spider+Crawler+Indexer component group might be implemented as a single program that downloads web pages, analyzes them and then uses their links to find new resources. However, the components listed are inherent to all search engines and the seo principles are the same.

Spider. This program downloads web pages just like a web browser. The difference is that a browser displays the information presented on each page (text, graphics, etc.) while a spider does not have any visual components and works directly with the underlying HTML code of the page. You may already know that there is an option in standard web browsers to view source HTML code.

Crawler. This program finds all links on each page. Its task is to determine where the spider should go either by evaluating the links or according to a predefined list of addresses. The crawler follows these links and tries to find documents not already known to the search engine.

Indexer. This component parses each page and analyzes the various elements, such as text, headers, structural or stylistic features, special HTML tags, etc.

Database. This is the storage area for the data that the search engine downloads and analyzes. Sometimes it is called the index of the search engine.

Results Engine. The results engine ranks pages. It determines which pages best match a user's query and in what order the pages should be listed. This is done according to the ranking algorithms of the search engine. It follows that page rank is a valuable and interesting property and any seo specialist is most interested in it when trying to improve his site search results. In this article, we will discuss the seo factors that influence page rank in some detail.

Web server. The search engine web server usually contains a HTML page with an input field where the user can specify the search query he or she is interested in. The web server is also responsible for displaying search results to the user in the form of an HTML page.