Blekko, the alternative “no-spam” search engine, has announced on a round of major improvements and a new interface. The company is defining it as a major upgrade to its search engine that will reduce even more spammy and low quality sites. After a review about this upgrade, you can find a little experiment i made with the new Blekko.

The New Upgrade

The timing of the upgrade is pretty unusual in this time of year- Just in the middle of the holiday season, while most search engines tries to avoid any changes at all (like Google stated no more Panda updates until next year) Blekko is implementing one if its most significant upgrades ever.

More Quality and Relevant Index- The index of the search engine has grown significantly, what suppose to offer the users better accurate relevant results and to improve long-tail search queries (that relies greatly on the size of the index).

Automatic Implementation Of 500 Slashtags- Blekko most unique attribute is the slashtag categories that are under the constant quality inspection of a human editor. The upgrade is improving this unique attribute in two ways:

• Expanding it to 500 slashtags from 110 (more than 4.5 times as much).
• Automatic implementation of the slashtags even when not searching with an actual slashtag.

New Design- Blekko has now more clean design and friendly interface with a prominent black fixed bar at the top and more familiar web colors (links in blue instead of red, URLs in green instead of grey). Here’s a screenshot of Blekko new search results page:

Testing The New Blekko

Using the unique /monte command in Blekko, that allows to compare results between Blekko, Google and Bing, I have conducted a few search experiments to examine the new upgrade regarding spam and low quality sites, in both high volume keywords and long-tail keywords.

I have compared the results of the queries small business and freelance jobs as a high volume keywords, and how to shave your head and what to do when someone stealing your content as a long-tail keywords. Here are my impressions:

For the short term high volume keywords Google and Bing provided better firsts 2-3 results than Blekko, however, in the rest of the results Blekko provided quality sites where in Google and Bing there were few spam and low quality sites.

For the long-tail keywords Google provided excellent results, Blekko provided 5-7 good results and Bing was horrible without almost any good result.

Conclusion

So to conclude, Bing and Google probably perform better than Blekko with high volume keywords, however for long-tail keywords Blekko can generate better results than Bing. At any case, i didn’t see any real spammy site on Blekko while Google and Bing did resulted a few.