Aug 3, 2011 08:00 GMT  ·  By

A security researcher says that Blekko is no better than its competition at filtering spam in search results, despite using such claims to promote itself.

Blekko launched on November 1, 2010, with the stated goal of providing a better search experience than Google. It's first page claims the engine slashes out spam, content farms and malware.

But according to Julien Sobrier, a senior security researcher with cloud security vendor Zscaler, while the content farm part might be true, the spam one is not.

"After investigating, I'm afraid that our results show Blekko doing no better than Google when it comes to filtering out spam," Sobrier says.

"Blekko appears to be focused on identifying content farms, which usually contain harmless spam, rather than hijacked sites that lead to malicious domains (fake store, fake Antivirus, etc.)," he explains.

Zscaler's research focused on fake online stores that sell counterfeit software, as according to Sobrier, this accounts for the majority of SEO spam today.

A query suggesting the intention of buying a license key for a popular piece of software usually returns 90% of rogue results on the first Google page. Most of them are compromised university sites that redirect to fake stores.

Searching for "buy Windows 7 key" on Blekko returns seven spam links on the first page out of ten, four of them being hijacked .edu sites. The spam continues on the second page with eight rogue links.

It's worth pointing out that Blekko's index counts around 3 billion pages, compared to Google's 46 billion. Fortunately, Blekko users clicking on the spam links are not redirected to the fake stores, but that's because of the attackers, not the search engine itself.

"The spam pages look at the Referer header, among other things, to differentiate between real users and bots (security tools, search engine indexers, etc.). Most of the spam pages redirect users to the malicious sites only if they come from a Google, Bing or Yahoo! search," Sobrier explains.