NEW SEARCH ENGINE TO TAKE ON GOOGLE AND BING

Blekko is a new search engine that has launched in beta today.  The new engine will attempt to use human input to refine results. The Blekko.com site uses what the site calls "slashtags": a curated list of sites around a given topic. Users can create the sites, and also use them as a search modifier to only search within them.

"Bing and Google have hundreds of contractors that use web tools to refine this relevance data - classifying porn, spam, domain parks, ecommerce sites, fake 404's, markov-spam, official sites, and so on," Rich Skrenta, chief executive, wrote in a blog post. "As a 20-person startup, we asked ourselves how blekko could assemble this essential data," Skrenta added. "Hire contractors? Use Mechanical Turk? Elance? But - of course! - we know a much better way.... A way you can get orders of magnitude greater participation, while at the same time being very open about the process. Let the public in."

Slashtags filter out so-called "spammy" sites, Blekko said, but depend on the individual creators to edit them and add new sites that crop up. Users can "follow" other slashtags and use them as filters, and also apply to edit them. The site also has a "global chatter" page which auto-tracks updates to the sites and to slashtags, and can serve as a sort of communication medium of sorts.

Blekko's initial goal, the company said will be to identify the 50 best sites on the Web for the top 100,000 search categories. Over time, the site will "auto-slash" queries. [PC Mag]