REDWOOD SHORES, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Blekko, the new search engine that is using human curation to eliminate spam from search, today announced it has banned the top Internet content farms from its results. Content farms are sites that litter the web with millions of pages and crowd out quality content from search results. Often, these content farms exploit overseas workers by paying as little as six cents a page to create their spam pages, while the sites themselves reap millions in ad revenue.
Blekko said its users, not algorithms, identified the now-banned spam sites. Every Blekko search result includes a “spam” button that allows users to create private blacklists of sites they don’t want showing up in their results. Users have been identifying spam sites in this manner since Blekko was launched in November. Now Blekko is banning the sites that received the most spam-votes from its index altogether. The 20 sites Blekko banned today include:
ehow.com
experts-exchange.com
naymz.com
activehotels.com
robtex.com
encyclopedia.com
fixya.com
chacha.com
123people.com
download3k.com
petitionspot.com
thefreedictionary.com
networkedblogs.com
buzzillions.com
shopwiki.com
wowxos.com
answerbag.com
allexperts.com
freewebs.com
copygator.com
“These sites are the worst spam publishers on the Web according to our users,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko. “They are literally responsible for millions of pages on the Web that our users say are just not helpful and they’d prefer they were banned permanently. So we’re going to do that for them.”
Blekko said it is confident removing current pages and blocking future pages from these sites will improve its overall search results. Human editors at Blekko already cull spam from search results and have created thousands of slashtags so that searches can be focused on the most valuable content sites.
According to the company’s Spam Clock (http://spamclock.com), 750 million pages of spam have been published to the Web in just the first 31 days of the year. Content farms and illegitimate spammers are adding about 1 million URLs an hour to the World Wide Web.
About Blekko
Blekko was founded in 2007 to pursue innovation in search. The company has raised $24 million since its founding in 2007 from U.S. Venture Partners and CMEA Capital, as well as leading angel investors including Ron Conway, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier, and Marc Andreessen. Blekko has 22 employees, including former Google and Yahoo! Search engineers.