News Report 4

Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Yahoo, Bing, and of course, the heavyweight Google, are all search engines that have had their run as the heavyweight in the web searching industry.  With Bing being the exception.  Internet search engines have become one of, if not, the most important feature for web users on the quest for information.  The Internet has become a massively huge world of information and anything else you can think about, and it is growing exponentially every day.  Search engines allow the user to harness the power of the Internet and make it easier to find things in such a dense world. 

For a long time, Google has been the front runner for Internet search engines, boasting the highest number of visits among active websites, and the access to more cites than any other search engine…and it’s easy to use, and who doesn’t love ease of use?  But as the web becomes larger and larger, reaching about a trillion web pages, search engines can become filled with junk.  The solution to such junk, “Blekko,” a brand new search engine that is set to be Google’s new competition in the world wide web.  Blekko advertises that with ‘the human touch’ search engines are easier and also yield LESS spam.  Everyone has performed a Google search before, and the results come back in the range of a few million results…how many of those million results do you actually need?  Are you really going to sort thru that many results? The answer is no, and probably about 10 results will do me just fine if I’m doing research, but for the average user, your only looking for one or two results, and then that’s it.  Blekko’s stance is that with the human touch, you can refine your searches and make it easier to find more relevant information.  Blekko is advertising that you can “slash the web” with the use of slash-tags “/\.”  The problem is, users have to learn how to do this…and you know how American’s feel about change, and learning new things…anyone for that matter is normally not up to it.

So will Blekko become the new Google?  Will it oust Google as the number one search engine?  Will it even compete?  I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Bosker, Bianca. "Blekko Search Engine To Rely On The Human Touch ." The Huffington Post. 1 Nov. 2010. Web. 2 Nov. 2010. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/01/blekko-search-engine-to-r_n_776806.html>.