Search engine Blekko, has integrated Facebook like data into search results. Simply connect your Facebook account to Blekko, via the Facebook button at the bottom of the home page and and you are done.
Once connected, Blekko will create a slashtag called /likes that contains sites you and your friends have liked via the Facebook like button. It will take a few minutes for /likes to fully populate.
Blekko has tried to distinguish itself from other search engines, like Google and Microsoft’s Bing, through the use of so-called slashtags, or curated lists of search results. The goal is to provide a more trusted and targeted list of search results, eliminating spam in the process. Blekko claims that more than 50,000 slashtags have been created.
“Millions of Facebook users are curating their web experience everyday by simply clicking ‘Like’ on the content, commerce, travel, restaurants and brands they love most,” said Rich Skrenta, chief executive of Blekko, in a statement. “We’ve taken this data and applied it to Blekko’s results making them spam-free and personally relevant.”
So, does this new kind of search appeal to you? I think the concept of slashtag is nice, although it does tend to complicate the searching process. But for better results, you do have to pay a price, don’t you? Social search has recently been incorporated in bing too. The best advertising campaign is word of mouth. The facebook ‘like’ adds a personal touch to this. If you see a website that your friend has liked, it’s more probable that you too would check it out rather than a website that hasn’t been liked by anyone. In this regard, social search would make the process of searching for personalized information quite intuitive.
