Blekko officially opened its public beta at http://blekko.com, launching a new search engine that brings human curation to web search.
The company said the new search engine provides improved search experience that focuses on delivering results from high quality sites and leaving behind spammers, aggregators and content farms.
The Blekko technology feature slashtags, a curated sets of websites organised around a particular topic.
These cover topics such as health, money, autos, gluten-free, neurotechnology, and the Grateful Dead.
Blekko said slashtags, which are appended to search queries, limit search results to only the curated sets of sites.
The search engine is also automatically applying slashtags to improve results in seven initial search categories: health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels.
For searches not determined to be within a slashtag category, Blekko uses its proprietary ranking algorithms to deliver relevant results from its 3 billion page web crawl.
Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta said today is the first step in a process of building a volunteer army at Blekko that will eventually slash spam from search and deliver the most relevant results.
"As the number of URLs on the web increases from billions to trillions, it will take a layer of human oversight to separate the trusted content from the spam," Skrenta said.
