Blekko Category Archive
Blekko to Add Ads
MediaPost reports that Blekko will begin experimenting with search ads. The report is that Blekko will use ads from Google or Bing. At this point, I do not yet see any advertising appearing, but it bodes well for a longer-term survival of Blekko as an alternative search engine if it can manage to find an income stream.
I usually check for ads with searches like discount hotels, online florists, or dSLR. None of these searches displayed ads for me, even after checking in the preferences to be sure that ads were enabled. Under the Privacy settings, there is an option for displaying ads or not, so I assume that once the ads start appearing, they would be easy to turn off by checking the "No ads" box or all the "SuperPrivacy" settings.
This may take a few days or longer before the ads start to appear. I am interested to see if they show up in the usual places or if Blekko will experiment with different placement.
Blekko: A New Search Approach
My March 2011 Online On the Net "Blekko: A New Search Approach" is up and is even freely available on the Online site. Bear in mind that this was written a few months ago, but I will say that Blekko surprised me, both for the reasons I found to use it and the reasons not to. To summarize, rather than using Blekko as a general web search engine, I really like the ability to use Blekko to research the web itself, exploring link patterns, ranking the data, and even searching my Facebook friends' likes (see yesterday's post). The amount of data that Blekko makes available from the seo link that points to search engine optimization data is impressive, plus Blekko has its own cache and link searches. So if you would like to read more, take a look at "Blekko: A New Search Approach."
Social Search Showdown: Google, Bing, & Blekko
In the past few weeks, both Bing and Google have announced changes to their social searching. With Blekko also having social searching via Facebook connect, I thought I'd compare how successful and useful I found each of the three, and explore the new announcements in a bit more depth. First though, for more searchers, social search may be a waste of time. If you do not have a large Facebook network of friends (or don't use Facebook), avoid Twitter, and have not built a social network, there is nothing to search. Or if you have a large Facebook or Twitter network of friends and family, but you want to search professional topics that are not of interest to those friends and family, the social search results will offer little but amusement, if you even see them.
But if you do have a social network and are interested in searching the "likes" of Facebook friends, Tweets, or posts in Google Reader, read on to see what's new and how to find the social results.
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