Blekko - A New Search Engine That Could Affect Digital Marketing

In recent months, many digital marketing professionals have pointed out that a vast majority of search results displayed on Google consist of spam content created by content farms. Google is generally considered to be the number one choice of digital marketing companies when it comes to marketing activities, because of the large number of users who use the search engine. However, the presence of large amounts of spam content on Google could result in users turning to alternative search options like Blekko, which may affect digital marketing strategies negatively.

What is Blekko?

Blekko is a small start-up company that focuses on spam-less search. When all companies are doing pretty much the same thing, Blekko has decided to do something different, by offering a unique Internet product to users. In March 2011, Blekko was noticed by the digital marketing community, when it announced that it had blocked more than a million websites on its search engine, for being content farms.

While Google has made changes to its algorithm to keep websites with spam content out of its search results, it has not proved to be as effective as Blekko. This is because the content-blocking decisions made by Blekko are based on human inputs, rather than a computer algorithm. The digital marketing community has considered this to be useful for Internet users, because currently, humans are the best way of determining what type of content is relevant.

Most digital marketing professionals believe that ranking content according to relevance is something that just cannot be done mechanically. Currently, computer programs are not very good at determining relevance, and finding out the intention behind particular pages of content. Even at times when human intelligence sometimes fails, it may only be possible to fool some people sometimes, rather than all of them every time.

Some of the features used by Blekko to get rid of spam are slashtags, a built-in spam reporting mechanism, and an open approach to how its ranking system works. The best thing about Blekko is that it is able to use the above features to outsource search rankings to a community, which effectively distributes relevancy measures across all users.

While Blekko works well today, it will only be able to provide highly relevant search results as more users begin using the system. Of course, like all search engines, there is a possibility of Blekko being fooled, if a big group of people is hired to 'like' spam websites. However, the real editors on Blekko are sure to find out about this activity, and put a stop to it.

Maybe, sometime in the future, scientists will be able to invent some kind of artificial intelligence that can understand content just like the human brain. Until then, digital marketing companies can continue to look for ways to outsmart the search engines.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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