Every time I hear about a new search engine that has come to market, I always think the same thing: what’s the point?

Almost everyone uses Google. The list of search engines that aren’t Google is staggering and yet, in spite of working on and with the internet for years I’ve never even heard of most of them.

A new search engine aims to change that, claiming that it brings back far more relevant results by adding a human bias to the search algorithm.

By using humans to preselect relevant sites and ignoring spam and the generally useless (but SEO’ed to within an inch of their life) content farms like eHow and WikiHow, the results are supposed to be way more helpful.

One of the suggested searches on the Blekko, “cure for headaches” brought back this extensive article on headache causes, symptoms and treatment, while the exact same search on Google brought back this nonsense that suggested I rub fruit on my head.

Probably the most interesting feature of Blekko is the introduction of slashtags.

If a user searches ‘global warming / green’ it would bring up only environmental websites to do with green groups or issues.

Similarly a search for ‘Paris Hilton /noporn’ would avoid any pornographic websites associated with the Hilton heiress.

Slashtags can be combined for more accuracy so a search like ‘global warming / date / technology’ which would bring up web pages about global warming and technology companies ranked by date.

Definitely something to look out for but I have no reason to suspect that I’m not going to revert right back to Google like I have after using every other startup search engine with a cool new set of features.

[Source: Daily Mail]