My business partner Julia Tverskaya and I had the pleasure of chatting with the CTO of Blekko Greg Lindahl at Sourcecon last week. Greg’s presentation was the one that we both enjoyed the most!
Why should sourcers check out Blekko? Here are some reasons.
Blekko is a search engine that has made creating custom search engines its major feature. They are called “slashtags“. People can influence what is found; this is democracy applied to search engines.
Blekko doesn’t show junk search results, including – what I especially appreciate – dynamically generated pages that are pages of results of a search query on some sort of site aggregating and selling information. (Many of us are tired seeing “Email, address, phone numbers, everything!” in search results for people on Google.)
Among slashtags already created is “/people”. It points to pages that contain online profiles and bios. For those of us who source for software engineers they also have a wealth of slashtags poinitng to all sorts of software development technologies. I’ve asked Greg if it would be possible to have a slashtag for pages with contact info and he said not yet, but it’s possible to create one.
The drawback right now is the small number of pages indexed, compared to search giants. This may be temporary; the company is small, too, and has good chances to expand coverage in the future.