How Blekko Underscores Search’s Shift To Human-Quality Content

When it comes to search engines, everyone but Google is the underdog. New search engine on the block Blekko.com is an underdog among underdogs, though it has been climbing steadily in popularity (a million users as of June, according to TechCrunch). Its mission, to “slash” spam, content farms, and malware has been resonating among the “sick and tired.”

The latest Blekko update, called Zorro, underscores the site’s mission to declutter search results, and it honestly works pretty well. I performed a dozen searches that one would expect to be laden with content farm results – from “build a telescope” to “potty train ferrets” – and got results from trust-able sites like Nasa.com. Thank you!

While I think I’ll try switching entirely Blekko for a month or so for my personal browsing (because it seems to work so far), I think the trend it illustrates is the most exciting part:

Human-quality content is winning.

One of the things Contently fought to emphasize to early investors we pitched (and also clients we pitch every day) is that in 5 years SEO garbage content will be gone. The future belongs to those who produce the kind of content people want to read. Blekko understands this, and is building a search engine around it. Google’s being slow to catch up, but it’s slowly axing content spam from its results with every update.

My Blekko experiment went a bit meta as I searched for “content farms”, getting results from tech blogs like ReadWriteWeb and respectable search engine blogs like SEOBook, while Google’s result included several spam sites in the top 10 results.

Despite my love of science fiction, I’m excited about building a future designed around people, not robots. Long live the humans!