Blekko Launches a Search Engine With Bias 133
Pickens writes "Previous specialized search engines including Cuil, Hakia, Powerset, Clusty, and RedZ — each had a special trick, but they've all faded from memory, some after crashing in flames, some after making their founders rich. Now Rafe Needleman reports at Cnet that along comes Blekko, whose claim to fame is that you can tilt your search results in the direction you like by using a category of bias, like 'liberal' or 'conservative.' Categorization lists are applied by appending a 'slashtag.' The query, 'climate change /conservative' will give you politically slanted results, for example. 'Climate change /science' will restrict your results to hits from scientific Web sites. Blekko won't have a real, Web-wide impact unless its concept — that bias is good and more aggressive search filtering is needed — gets some traction, writes Needleman. But 'Blekko is a solid alternative to Google and Bing for anyone, and more importantly it's got great potential for researchers, librarians, journalists, or anyone who's willing to put some work into how their search engine functions in order to get better results.'"
Needs Work; Selling Point Doesn't Exist for Me (Score:5, Interesting)
Massive failure on that example [blekko.com] unless you consider the top three results (newscientist.com, livescience.com and physorg.com) to be more than just news sites. And (of course you new this was coming) the gold standard does a better job with the same search [google.com].
Of the first page of Blekko results, I'd argue that only half of them have any business being on there. The other problem is that a lot of things like date ranges or news that this slashtag hopes to fill is already covered by Google's advanced notation [google.com]. People who need these have probably already learned to use them (for instance the site:slashdot.org term helps me see if a story has already been up on a topic). If you want a bias other than range restrictions, just add it as a search term.
I spent a lot of time playing around with this and nothing I tried really jumped out at me as "useful." Of course I was just fiddling around and not really looking for anything in particular.
The bias of bias (Score:4, Interesting)
Bias is inherent in everyone, this engine included. Who decides what fits a category? It is up to individuals to interpret the bias. Who decides whether something should appear in /terrorist or /freedomfighter ?
Re:Needs Work; Selling Point Doesn't Exist for Me (Score:3, Interesting)
Given this, I think what Blekko is doing is assuming that if you type in "climate change
I'm not saying this website is a great idea- I'll still be using Google for the foreseeable future, both for general news and scholarly search, and the idea that people can now have search engines catered to their confirmation bias disturbs me- but in this case I think their choices make sense.
Re:reality (Score:4, Interesting)
Google changes your results in that regular use of Google will filter out and make things have higher rank depending on your search history.
For example, searching a lot about Linux and their distributions will make Wine the software the top result instead of the beverage.
Yet another reason not to accept JS or cookies from Google. The feature itself may not be so terrible. It's pretty bad though that this would be turned on by default, which is the same problem with lots of features that try to be "helpful" without clearly explaining up-front what they are doing and why. It goes counter to the common-sense expectation that a give set of search results is based on only the keywords entered. It really sounds like a way to put a pleasant spin on all of that data collection and retention: "See, it's just so that we can better serve you, honest! No, we won't delete it upon request."
Re:Unneeded? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about searching for
industrial design colleges
On google, no actual colleges. On Blekko, it auto-slashtags it to industrial design /colleges, and 100% of the results are colleges.