With Google Changing Algorithms, Blekko Has a Challenge in Hand

To notch up a high rank in Google, all that a website has to do is have more links to sites that have great reputation. However, this has resulted in proliferation of sites that contain very little relevant information, in spite of ranking high.

What is the trick these sites adopt?

They use links and keywords to game Google.

Now, Blekko, an innovative search engine, comes up with a promise. “We will clean up the web and get all the spam out of it.” This is the undertaking offered by Rich Skrenta, Blekko’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

The technique of Blekko is to use vertical search engines that will focus on specific niches rather than attempt to cover the whole web, something what Google does.

In other words, a vertical search engine indexes content specialized by location, by subject, usually for consumers, or by industry and geared to businesses.

The relevancy of vertical search has been debated a lot. Will Rich Skrenta make Google irrelevant?

It is too early to answer this question in an affirmative or negative way.

Google still dominates search. It is the main search engine for people to buy products, visit websites, for information, and conduct research.

However, the emergence of mobile is transforming the nature of search.

                                                                           

The New Challenge

Let us get down to what is happening today. Mobile is now the main hot market for businesses. This is the market in which businesses like to enter in no time.

Today, Google has many competitors trying to have a slice of cake in the mobile segment.

This does not mean Google is taking it lying down. This giant is even more assertive on mobiles than on desktops. It still has more than 95 percent of the globe’s search market.

However, people are changing their search behavior. Consumers directly go to Yelp or Amazon bypassing Google. It is easier and faster to book a table in a restaurant by opening an application than by making a search on Google.

The pace, at which people are making searches on mobile, is a big challenge to search engines. One of the biggest challenges is to customize search engine optimization to the mobile segment.

Screening on mobiles is far smaller than on desktops. This simply means it is not good enough to be in the top 10 in search results. Even though the mobile screen may display the same number of search results, the relative positions can be different.

It is a cutthroat world over there.

Rich Skrenta is vehement he has a solution to today’s web browsers. His search engine is using a concept called slashtags to allow ease of searches and categorize searches. Skrenta wants users to get the sites they want with spam sites eliminated altogether.

“Blekko is a better way to search the web.”

Is it? With Google introducing Hummingbird Intelligence, the fight has got more intense.

It was only a matter of time before Google’s developers came up with an idea to smarten search. The new algorithm Hummingbird is an intelligent way that looks at the context of the question rather than the words in a query.

Blekko has a similar objective, which is to go straight to the results the web surfer wants, by eliminating the superfluous.

The battle is not over yet.