This new search vertical, called /safeshop, includes only human selected, reputable shopping sites and is designed to thwart spammers and malware distributors.
“It seems more important than ever that we work together to create a really great holiday shopping search experience that weeds out the online Grinches who want to steal, rather than give during the holidays,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko. “Algorithmic search is sinking. Web users collectively will be able to build a holiday shopping search experience that protects consumers.”
Blekko launched in September promising to create a new kind of search experience that would enlist human editors in its effort to eliminate spam, recognizing the computer generated algorithms can only go so far in returning relevant search results. Already, thousands of slashtags have been created by thousands of human editors.
Any user can go to Blekko today and just add /safeshop to their search. From that point forward they will only receive results from the trusted online stores curated by fellow Blekko users. Blekko is also asking users to help edit the /safeshop slashtag and to add additional trusted outlets to the search vertical.
Other search engines that rely solely on algorithmic ranking have recently been called out for promoting sites that offer consumers a poor experience. In particular, a recent story in the New York Times suggests that Google does not discriminate in its algorithm between positive and negative sentiment. Sites have found that negative attention can help them gain additional promotion in algorithmic search results. Blekko’s /safeshop slashtag fixes this by limiting results to only trusted online sellers.
