How to Use Blekko to Rock at Your Job

The author of the web’s first worm-virus, teamed with a man who dresses as a medieval warrior and goes to battle on the weekends and a woman who follows World of Warcraft, acupuncture and ballet, have raised $24 million dollars to storm the gates of the Google Castle. They got incredible press coverage when their new search engine, called Blekko, launched this week – but they are probably going to get slaughtered.

In the meantime, they have provided an opportunity for countless other freaks and geeks to use the magical tool they’ve built to grow our stature wherever we work; to cut through information overload, to shine a bright light on opportunities and to augment our minds with the snap of a finger. Read on for my advice about how to use Blekko and we’ll use it well – for as long as it lasts.

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What is Blekko?

Blekko was the name of company CEO Rich Skrenta’s first networked computer. Skrenta was 15 years old when he wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II machines in 1982; it is believed to have been the first large-scale self-spreading personal computer virus ever created. Skrenta went on to work on the Amiga at Commodore, then at Sun Microsystems, then co-founded the Netscape-acquired Dmoz and the Tribune/Gannett/Knight Ridder-acquired local news search engine Topix.

Now he’s raised funding from a group of investors that include Marc Andreeson, to build Blekko. His band of freaky geeks include CTO and Society for Creative Anachronisms member Greg Lindahl and community manager Cheralyn Watson, who prioritized being ready for the WoW and ballet communities in the days leading up to Blekko’s launch. (I found that quite charming.) The entire Blekko team includes more than 20 people.

What have these people built?

Blekko, simply put, is a social Custom Search Engine creation service with RSS feeds. It lets users curate and subscribe to mini-search engines that return results only from selected websites, thus increasing the signal to noise ratio and tightly controlling the context of search results.

If you’ve used Google Custom Search, really used it, that very powerful tool has been improved upon in Blekko because the latter was built to search large groups of sites and to have those groups shared and edited.

I used Google Custom Search all day, every day, to query my defined sets of blogs from technology analysts, geolocation specialists, semantic web scientists, youth marketing bloggers, English-language Asian tech bloggers and more, about whatever topics we’re writing about here at ReadWriteWeb.

These Custom Search Engines are like dynamic reference books, populated by the blog archives of topical experts. They are things of magic – but Google CSE has never caught on beyond its widespread use as an embedded search box for a single website. That’s tragic, if inevitable: the most powerful magic on the web will never be appreciated in its making, only in its results. Those of us who appreciate its making get to make some it ourselves. But more on that in a minute.

Blekko launched this week to big write-ups in the Wall St. Journal, the New York Times, TechCrunch and a flood of other outlets all over Techmeme. Frankly, I think it got all that press because it’s backed by Andreeson, makes big claims about improving on Google, talks smack about red-hot content farm Demand Media as part of its pitch, has founders with very credible pedigrees and has good PR. But the general response to the company’s product has been confusion and doubt.

As a regular and heavy user of Custom Search Engines, I’ve got some ideas about why most people are unlikely to appreciate the beauty and power of Blekko. But cynicism is cheap. Strategic advice on how to most effectively use a good tool is far more valuable and interesting.

How to Be a Blekko Power User, For Fun and Profit

I’d like to share a few thoughts about how I’m planning on using Blekko, based on the strengths and weaknesses of Google Custom Search. But first some assumptions:

• I’m going to assume that you work in a field where high-quality information is valuable.
• I’m going to assume that you can imagine the value of first mover’s advantage, when it comes to information.

I believe that everyone works in a field like that, most people just don’t know it.

First step, compile yourself a magic collection.

A searchable collection of your industry’s top blogs and websites allows you to quickly put any topic in context, based on what the most knowledgeable people in your field have written about that topic in the past.

I’ve built scores of Custom Search Engines, but the first one I put into production is something I call my Magic Search. It’s a collection of 25 of the top Web 2.0 news and review blogs on the web – all our competitors here at ReadWriteWeb.

I do a Magic Search whenever I see a new company or website, to see if and what our competitors have written about it. Last week, for example, someone sent us a link to the incredible website MapCrunch (like StumbleUpon for world-wide Google Street View views, try it!) and I was impressed. I did a Magic Search for it and with a snap of my fingers found that two of our biggest competitors had already written about it 3 weeks prior. (I hate to tell you how the sausage is made, readers, but if any of the leading tech blogs finds out that something has been written about by a competitor 3 weeks ago, then that would mean that we are 3 weeks behind if we write about it afterwords. There is nothing a leading tech blogger hates more than being considered behind the times. So I tweeted about it, and I’m telling you about that wonderful site now.)

If I’m writing about a company and I am being a good blogger who wants to mention competitors in providing the same type of search, I Magic Search it. For example, this week Nick Bilton wrote about the new email snooze-button service Nudgemail at the New York Times and got slammed in comments for failing to mention another service that had been providing the same kind of service for years. I reviewed Nudgemail after Bilton, and I made sure not to make the same mistake. I Magic Searched the neglected competing company and found that it had been written about by my competitors a number of times, along with still other companies providing the same type of service. So I included links to all of them in my write-up and I think it made for a pretty snazzy article.

If I want to know what startups provide a particular kind of service, I Magic Search it. If I want to know what my competitors have written about a person in our sector, I Magic Search them. If I want background on anyone or anything I’m looking at, background drawn from the archives of specialists in my field, I Magic Search it.

It’s awesome. I’ve got it on my phone, I’ve got it on my browser toolbar and I’ve got it a couple of other places I won’t mention here.

I’ve built that and my other Custom Search Engines with Google CSE, but Blekko is a very nice alternative. It provides a clean, sharable URL. It can be collaboratively edited. It handles search across hundreds of domains in one collection very nicely. It offers date-based search in a click. Blekko is a better service than Google CSE and I plan on moving all my engines there, as soon as the company offers a way for me to share them privately with my co-workers and no one else. Blekko’s management says that’s on the development road-map but not available yet.

Quick tips:

• Build a collection of top blogs on any topic using any of these methods, or others – or just Google for “top blogs in X” and grab someone else’s list to turn into a custom search engine.
• If you find a list on a page – try putting that page through LinkLeecher or some other way to quickly scrape the URLs off the page and into your Custom Search Engine creation tool. Sometimes I’ll open a text editor next to a browser page, drag the URLs onto the text editor, then find and replace all instances of “http” with “[linebreak] http”.
• If you’ve got a collection of the top blogs on any topic built, there are any number of things you can do with that, if you’re creative.

Next step: Building Collections on the fly.
Content on the public web is searchable and the savvy searcher will manipulate that content to search it the way they want it.

Both Blekko and Google CSE are well-suited for carefully curated collections. Blekko in particular encourages the creation and maintenance of high-quality custom search engines with its easy collaborative editing, subscription to updates and more.

Sometimes you’ve got to do it quick and dirty, though.

Here’s a story. This Spring I was hired to be one of the official event bloggers at a crazy conference called Techonomy. Bizarrely creative and accomplished people from all around the world came to speak at the event about how to use technology to solve the world’s great problems (water, food, poverty, pollution, etc.)

The night before the event, a co-worker and I scraped the names and associated URLs from the pages listing the speakers at the event. I then threw those URLs into a Custom Search Engine that I used to do super-fast research while blogging on the conference floor. “Speaker X says A,B and C. That’s something that Organization Y, also participating at the event today, has posted the following white papers about in their website archives.” That worked really well.

While I was at it, I also put the names and URLs into a .csv file, uploaded them into Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and paid $50 to have people around the world collect the Twitter handles, country-of origin and gender for each of the several hundred event participants. It took them about 90 minutes. I then created Twitter lists of all the participants, the women participants and the international participants, in part so I could put all three lists into Tweetdeck and make sure that as I was covering the event, I could track what people with different backgrounds were saying about the day. I also envisioned those lists being loaded into Flipboard, so you could have an iPad magazine made up of all the links shared by women who had attended the Techonomy conference, for example.

A few years prior, I did the same thing (and more) with companies launching at the DEMO conference, so whenever I was thinking about one, I could quickly search the websites of all the others and determine who else was working in the same sector.

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