I stumbled across blekko (http://blekko.com/) when I was researching alternative search engines in Wikipedia. The original need was to find another large scale search engine that would allow search results parsing (seeing as the Google Web Search API is now defunct).

blekko seems like it's been built with a focus on capturing the interest of SEO professionals and web developers as a key demographic. There are 3 core features of blekko that make me think this.

blekko has a search API! now maybe this is a move that they will U-turn in the future but seeing as it's the only large scale search engine providing this at the moment, now is the time to use it!

http://help.blekko.com/index.php/does-blekko-have-an-api/

Another great feature of blekko is it's built-in shortcuts for SEO, this allows you to investigate a particular website, it's inbounds links, whois, duplicate content etc. SEO is obviously an important feature for blekko so much so they've put it right into their SERP.

What I most like about this, is that it allows non tech savvy users to play and understand SERP more, spreading the knowledge and allowing more people understand why a site might be better that another website.


One of the things Google has stopped showing is an accurate list of websites linking to another site. Obviously sites like SEOMoz and alternative tools have sprung up to provide replacements, but blekko shows what seems to be a more complete list and for free!


As per wikipedia's write up, blekko boasts an index of 3 billion which is a nice chuck of data, the only downside is that it's currently very US focused. So for those of you outside, we'll need to wait until the search results become localised.

Until then, it's great as an additional tool in the SEO toolbox - stay tuned.



http://blekko.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/blekko