With news of the launch of alternative Search site Blekko, which purports to be able to eliminate spam search results, the industry is waiting to see whether the site will gain any following outside the tech community.

In particular, the issues surround Blekko's USP and the concept of 'slashtagging', a new type of content tagging which requires the user to re-learn the basics of search. The point of the exercise? To reduce the number of pointless links that are returned for any search query, thereby helping the user to find what's required more swiftly and efficiently.

Slashtags are hardly different to the use of hashtags in Twitter, a means of identifying information which has certainly caught on. If they become successful, one assumes this approach will be adopted by larger search engines - and if not, well, we'll see. Whatever the long term outcome, for professionals like me who work across Digital PR, Search and Social Media, slowly watching the amalgamation of ideas and functions from each area is exciting.

Re-educating consumers where an action has become second nature - i.e. simply entering a search query in its simplest term with no preamble, as per the current model - is always a challenge, irrespective of how simple the idea is. And slashtagging is simple, it's just different to what's commonplace at present.

So, what is a slashtag? In short, it's a means of limiting search parameters by identifying specific content to be searched. Slashtags can be assigned narrowly, to a specific subject for example /horses - or more broadly, /news.

I suspect that if this works, those affected the most will be the sites which are set up as content farms, directories and sites comparison sites, those which maximise traffic via SEO but offer the user relatively little in terms of functionality. And, consequently, it's likely that very few people outside the companies affected would miss those sites for very long.

More information about Blekko and slashtagging can be found here.