Blekko Launches a Search Engine With Bias

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 in 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.""

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