Early this morning, I got a beta invite to test Blekko through a link in Search Engine Land. The buzz for Blekko has been building for a while and since my friend Krishna Srinivasan works there, I have been following it with even more interest.
I started with a few simple searches using the pre-set filters. No results were out of the ordinary and then I started to use the slashtags and I got hooked.
1) How did we live without /date?
Dell has this popular 24″ S-IPS monitor called the U2410. Initial batches of this monitor produced lemons, lots of them. If you read through the comments for this monitor, you would think that it is a total dud, yet this sells a lot. Then you read through and you realize that Dell fixed the problems in a later run and then you have to look at the date of the blog to realize and speculate if this was written for a old version or a new version of the monitor. Very rarely blogs mention the revision number of the monitor.
Enter /date tag of Blekko.
The search results are now sorted based on date which gives me a much easier way to navigate this problem. I think Google advanced search allows you to do this, but I don’t remember the last time I used it. /date is just more convenient.
Update:
Matt Cutts was kind enough to let me know this through twitter. He is right. I was wrong. It is trivial to sort by date using google as well.
2) API searches are neat.
The API searches are pretty cool as well. For instance the /amazon search is pretty slick. Searching for the HP ZR24W S-IPS monitor returns this in Blekko, and not too surprisingly, it has related monitors that I might be interested in. Pretty convenient to be able to do this within Blekko.
Same with flickr searches. I would totally use these vertical API searches for things like www.stackoverflow.com
3) Suggested slashtags are neat.
Often you search for a topic in general and then you start dwelling into narrower drill downs of subsets of areas. For instance, I searched for Mt.Whitney and blekko suggested /climbing.
Some of those links are super awesome. I can see use for this in many places.
Same with a lot of a slashtags Mt. Whitney /photoblogs – I found a bunch of content today through that search about Mt.Whitney that as a photographer, I wish I had found out much earlier 
. There is a unique way to “discover” things using blekko. I can’t wait for this to get more social (and easier social).
4) Your own inter-tubes.
Often I want to find out something from a set of websites that either I created or I know was created by a friend. This is stuff I know that exists. I currently do this with the site:foobar.com filter on google. But often I don’t know which of these three sites I read that last. So I try site:foo.com, site:bar.com and site:wheretheheckitis.com.
I created a few slashtags with those three sites and now I have my own inter-tubes for narrow searches limited to websites I know and I can limit my searches to it.
For instance, I created a /baphoto slashtag for photo blogs and galleris of bay area photographers. My own custom search engine.
This is what I tweeted, an hour into blekko.
I see lots of uses for blekko, in particular with a lot of the vertical searches I do each day. /Rails /Ruby /StackOverflow /Programming /TechBlogs and of course /Date.
I used blekko as my only search engine today. Couple of times when I thought I needed google, I saw that there was a /google slashtag which uses google search engine, so that solved that problem .
