Search-Engine Wars: Can Bing (or Blekko) Beat Google?

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Google's single biggest defense against Bing isn't anything new and splashy, though. It's the fact that it's still better at the basic job of responding to queries with a list of the most relevant sites, ranked in the most logical order. When I search for "Canon S95," for instance, it's smart enough to make its top listing a link to Canon's page for its PowerShot S95 camera. On Bing, that page is the second result — the first one is an obscure site that mentions the S95 only in passing. Gaffes like that leave me using Bing as a supplement to Google rather than a replacement for it.

Of course, Microsoft has the wherewithal to go on refining its search engine indefinitely if it chooses. Start-up companies don't have that luxury, and more than one has proven that targeting Google is a little like opening a hamburger stand with the express goal of shattering the McDonald's hegemony. (In Silicon Valley, one failed would-be Google killer, Cuil, is practically synonymous with overweening ambition.)

The founders of a new site called Blekko wisely deny that they're out to crush Google. But their service — slightly unappetizing name and all — sports the freshest approach of any all-new search engine to come along in quite a while. The big idea behind Blekko, which launched on Halloween, is the slashtag, a keyword you append to your query to restrict the search to a specific list of sites — ones with reputable information about a particular topic, for instance, or those of a particular political bent or specialists in a particular type of content like video.

Searching Blekko for "california /news," for instance, pulls up different links from those found with "california /travel." Likewise, entering "glenn beck /conservative" or "glenn beck /liberal" will get you wildly varying results. And when you don't include a slashtag, the engine aims to put the most trustworthy sources up highest on the list. Search for "lung cancer," for example, and you'll get links to the National Institute of Health, WebMD, and the American Medical Association.

The niftiest thing about slashtags is that they're not the result of Google-like automation. Instead, Blekko is taking a Wikipedia-style approach, letting its users create and edit tags. The results are still rough — my search results on Blekko are too often thick with stale links rather than up-to-the-minute stuff — but the idea is bursting with potential. (I didn't use Wikipedia a couple of weeks after it launched in 2001, but I'll bet it was a tad spotty then too.)

Google may be a behemoth, but its market share is more fragile than you would think. There's absolutely nothing stopping you from immediately dumping one search engine for a superior competitor — hey, just ask AltaVista. And even if you go back to Google again and again, as most of us do, it's reassuring to know that alternatives such as Bing and Blekko are out there.

McCracken blogs about personal technology at Technologizer, which he founded in 2008 after nearly two decades as a tech journalist. His column for TIME.com, also called Technologizer, appears every Tuesday.

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