subject: How Blekko Affects Marketing [print this page] How Blekko Affects Marketing How Blekko Affects Marketing
In October, a new search engine was launched named Blekko. It attempts to weed out many of the tools that online marketers typically use. These include blogs, article marketing sites and many other such devices. In keeping with his own vision of relevancy the engine's founder, Rich Skrenta, opted to use human editors to filter such material out. He considers much of this content to be sub-par and therefore not worth peoples' time.
So how does this affect web marketers like me, and possibly, you? The first thing that will change will be that because there are human editors who filter out content, no amount of search engine optimizationwill register a bad or shoddy blog on the engine. Furthermore, those efforts which are meant to put articles as front and center will not work either.
Currently there are nosearch engine marketing (PPC) ads running on Blekko but this search engine lends itself so well to this form of advertising that it's unfathomable that they won't have it on there. Particularly since that is the single source of revenue for engines like Google who still takes home 97% or so of their revenue from AdWords Ads and content network ads. Each slashtag is a means to target people according to what they're looking for so not only does it help disambiguate searches fort eh users, it also helps do the same thing for advertisers. Therefore when someone searches for "Big Red" you'll know if they're searching for the bubble gum, the sports team, the Verizon ad campaign or the song. You will then have a much easier time serving ads onto to those who care about them. This will greatly help how internet marketing operates in the search engine space.
Does this mean that this engine will be a Google killer? It remains to be seen but the smart money is no. Other engines have come out in the past to big hype among the intelligentsia of the internet world the techies, geeks, venture capitalists, marketers and bloggers all to no avail. Wolfram Alpha is a great example of this. It was supposed to overtake Google in searches related to calculations and detail-oriented searches. The problem is no mass advertising, therefore no one knows about it from the mainstream. It has to build up a following enough to give it critical mass which is hard when people are basically content to use Google which also does basic calculations on its own or else tells you who does.
We'll see what sort of impact it has, but for now Google's dominance is not in jeopardy. Most people will probably find this system too complex to care about it over their own system. That's, of course, only if they hear about it at all.
