Comment by arromatic
7 months ago
How did the slashtag feature worked and what did it do ? It seems like a interesting concept but sadly the site is dead . What happened to it ?
7 months ago
How did the slashtag feature worked and what did it do ? It seems like a interesting concept but sadly the site is dead . What happened to it ?
People would add sites for a particular topic (aka slashtag) to their list. That would build a virtual custom search engine within the search engine. And topic specific searches thrown at it would consistently out perform Bing and Google in terms of search quality. The meta "spam" slash tag (everyone got their own) would let you tell the engine sites you never wanted to see in your search results so if you were tired of your medical queries being spammed by quacks, add them to your spam list and they wouldn't be in your results.
FWIW, I've wanted things like that for so long. I'm sad that I never even heard of Blekko.
Why did it shut down ?
Ultimately, lack of traffic. During Blekko's lifetime Google went from paying people less than $10M/quarter to send their search traffic to Google to over $4B/quarter to do that. If you are ad based you need traffic to serve ads to.
At some point a pay for search model might emerge that has a big enough audience to support a company but that time is not yet here.
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