(app review) Blekko

Blekko home page

Never heard of it? I hadn’t either. I came across the company while reading this article on MobileSyrup. Founded in November 2010, the company aims to be a Google alternative and uses “slashtags” to curate their searches.

Their website states:  “At Blekko, our mission is to create a differentiated search experience by delivering high quality, curated results and organizing content into categories.”

Anyway, so the article peaked my curiosity and since I’m always up to try something new (and because their website looked very clean and minimal), I decided to review it!

Here are my findings:

To start off, I did what everyone does: I googled searched my name.

Note: I use adblock, so you can’t see the ads that would normally be there in Google.

I think the interface is nice, the lack of ads is a refreshing change. I’m not too crazy about the thick blue bar on the left side of the page, but oh well. As for the results themselves, I have to say – for my name, at least – these seem much more refined to me than the Google results I get. My actual website (this one) shows up higher on Blekko for my name than it does on Google (where my WordPress blog takes precedence):

Anyway, the images section Blekko, while mostly accurate was lacking a lot of pictures from my site that Google had picked up.

Blekko:

vs Google:

Note: no, none of those photos is me. I can only assume that we share a common first name.

Anyway, so after that I decided to do a more popular search: “Nexus 4 cases” (incidentally, my new phone!)

A much more colourful search page for Nexus 4, complete with shopping and top result tabs.

The video page showed a simple list of mostly YouTube videos. Nothing fancy.

As we previously saw, the image search arranges photos in a grid. Clicking on them pops them into a lightbox and you can scroll left and right to see rest of the results.

Final Thoughts

All in all, using Blekko was a nice experience. Though it doesn’t match up to Google in images or video search yet, I think the general web search is definitely comparable, and I might even use it for a couple of days. I love the minimalistic interface and the colourful tabs that pop up on the side. Lightbox effects are always appreciated, though they lack the sophistication of Google image search interface.

But will Blekko achieve it’s goal of getting up there with Google and Bing? I guess time will tell!