Robert_Charlton - 5:04 am on Jul 10, 2012 (gmt 0)

Blekko is potentially too useful, IMO, to waste bandwidth grumbling about its name. To echo chrisv1963's comment above....

However, I checked the Blekko serps today and I must admit that they are better and cleaner than Google.

I noticed something along the same lines a few weeks ago, though Google's huge index ultimately made Google's results the most helpful to me. I'd posted the observation in the Host Crowding vs Brand Authority discussion [webmasterworld.com...] on June 19th, and think it's worth quoting here....

I should note that [excessive reliance on "brand authority"] may also be screwing up usefulness in big ways. I tried a [repair brandname widget] search today, and useful results were almost impossible to find, not only on Google, but also on Bing. Ultimately I needed to drop the brandname and just use [repair widget], without the brand. All that said, I'm convinced that this is another of those queries where there actually weren't very many good pages satisfying it. Cleanest results initially appeared to come from Blekko ;) ...by quite a bit... but Google had the largest index and ultimately that's where I found the marginally most helpful content. It took a lot of digging. It's not a search I'd tried before, so I can't compare.

One of the problems in using Blekko for SEO research, btw, is that if Blekko isn't indexing what it considers "spam", it's limiting the usefulness of its SEO tools in cases where users might like to use them, say, to evaluate backlink problems with a site.

I'm not sure whether Blekko is in fact self-limiting in this way... but if it is, this presents a problem for those SEOs wanting to use the engine to assess backlinks.