Our showdown produced some surprising results, with all three contestants getting in their licks at various points. The outcome also underscored that sites perform differently in different categories—a key fact to keep in mind when doing serious research online.
To conduct our test, we began with a list of 100 real-world searches. Our test queries spanned more than a dozen key everyday categories, from people and places to current events and even recipes and homework help. To keep things interesting, we took care to include some of the categories where Blekko says its human-driven approach excels over pure computer algorithms, including personal finance and health. Then we plugged every one of those 100 queries into Blekko, Google, and Bing, scoring the winner on each search based on the relevance, in our eyes, of the top results.
Blekko’s human-based differentiation has been tried plenty of times before, starting with Yahoo, which started as a directory of websites handpicked by its founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo. Then 1997 saw the arrival of a human-filtered directory called the Mining Company, which later morphed into About.com. Blekko’s twist is to have humans pre-select the most useful sites on key topics and then limit searches to those sites—and also to rope users into creating their own lists of relevant sites. Blekko uses what it calls “slashtags” in its searches to limit results to those human-endorsed sites. Typing “Moroccan lentil soup /recipes,” for instance, limits the search to a hand-picked list of sites, including Food Network and MarthaStewart.com. And for some topics—including personal finance, hotels, recipes and a few others—Blekko will automatically apply the slashtag for you; no need to type it.
So how did Blekko perform in our face-off? Here’s the final score from our 100 searches: Google won, earning the point on 57 of our test queries. Bing was the runner up, with 29 points. And trailing in third was Blekko with a score of 14.
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The scores don’t tell the whole story. In some categories, we saw how the Blekko approach could make it competitive with the big names. In personal finance, for example, Blekko held its own, splitting the category evenly with Google and leaving Bing shut out. Feeding Blekko the query “Roth IRA,” for example, turned up a helpful overview at a respected blog as the top result—a much better showing than the top results at Google and Bing. In this case, Blekko had automatically limited the search to its list of designated personal-finance sites.
But overall, Blekko just couldn’t match Google for relevance. In some cases, the site failed to apply the right slashtag from the list of tags it says should “auto-fire.” What’s more, Blekko showed a propensity to deliver bizarrely off-topic results for some of our test queries.
Consumers bewildered by a rash of resetting rates on loans and various outstanding credit lines now have the same tools banks have to aggregate all their debt in one place, after free online personal finance tool Credit Sesame launched a beta version today to help users get a complete financial snapshot all in one place.
Previously only available to banks or brokers, Credit Sesame uses an in-house loan analytics engine to help users instantly view their credit and debt in one place, while monitoring and tracking often baffling financial information like their credit score, home value and debt-to-income ratio simultaneously.
The news that they can now take their finances fully into their own hands is part of a continuing trend of consumers sick of commercial banks pushing their own complementary loan products on them — or who may just be sick of their bank or broker all together.
Under the company’s system, users are first asked to register their portfolios using the same security technology and encryption methods as banks and financial institutions use, and then Credit Sesame automatically retrieves users’ relevant data like debt, credit, and mortgages so that they don’t have to enter their information manually.
They can then fiddle with Credit Sesame’s tools to set personal goal parameters; see and apply for a wide variety of loans that may fit their restructuring needs; and even create a “what if” scenario that allows them to view multiple scenarios for potential savings or loans based on changes to a user’s financial situation such as a divorce or a job loss.
By using complex algorithms and portfolio “depth” testing, the new beta site will now create 5,000 scenarios with thousands of lending products to help each user find the three best pre-qualified solutions—saving an average user hundreds of dollars a month as they streamline their finances via the web ecosphere.
“We find homeowners as much as $600 a month in savings through restructuring, refinancing and new pre-qualified low-interest loan offers,” said Adrian Nazari, CEO and founder of Credit Sesame. “That’s $7,200 of yearly savings. If that money was put toward debt repayment, imagine how much faster that loan would be paid off and how much money would be saved. The opportunities are out there.”
Since launching to private testers in September, Credit Sesame currently manages $250 million in loans and has generated more than $18 million in lifetime savings for its users.
Once registered, the site will continue delivering a free monthly credit score and instant alerts when more optimal savings opportunities become available.
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