Blekko The New Search Engine With The Spam FreeTechnology

A new search engine that became accessible to the public Monday is taking aim at Google's failure to weed out useless spam sites from its results.

Blekko, the latest kid on the search engine block, is hoping to give out more refined results from trustworthy sources and avoid pointing to bogus sites created by content farms and other internet bottom-feeders that subsist only to collect traffic.

"The goal is to fresh up Web search and get all the spam out of it," Blekko co-founder Rich Skrenta told The New.

Like Google, Bing, Ask.com and its other competitors, Blekko's search engine crawls billions of websites on any given search, but relies on what Skrenta calls "large-scale human curation" to edit the results into a batch of the most supportive sites

In particular, Blekko aims to clean up results in categories its creators have determined triggers mainly polluted results, including health, colleges, recipes, personal finance, hotels and cars.

The most important upgrade to Blekko's search engine is the addition of slashtags that auto-fire for queries that fall into one seven categories: health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels.

The auto-fire functionality is intended with passive searchers in mind, and aims to get rid of friction for first time users. The technology that powers these auto-slashtags was developed through a wide research and development phase that implicated analyzing the relationship between queries and the type of spam results they normally generate.

Blekko is presently available on the web or as a mobile-optimized site, but mobile applications are also said to be in the works.

Stephanie Gilmore The First Female Surfer To Win Four World Titles

Australia's Stephanie Gilmore has happen to the first female surfer to ever win four world titles from as many attempts, after winning her quarter-final at the Rip Curl Pro Search event in Puerto Rico.

The 22-year-old didn't have it all her own way against resolute Hawaiian Melanie Bartels, but did enough to clinch the title, before being chaired off Middles Beach by men's defending champion and Rip Curl stable-mate Mick Fanning.

Bartels put up an almighty fight, with Gilmore's 13.87 mutual score for her two best waves giving her victory by just .10 of a point.

The happy assassin must now be eyeing off the record of seven women's world titles achieved by surfing icon Layne Beachley.

Gilmore is now through to the semi-finals at the Rip Curl Pro Search event, but can now relax knowing that her historic feat is already with her.

Sydney Zoo Welcomes Elephant Calf

Sydney's Taronga Zoo has welcomed its first female Asian elephant calf after a fast birth just after midnight this morning.

The as-yet unnamed 120kg calf was born after a half-hour labour to 18-year-old Pak Boon, who came at the zoo in 2006.

The calf was nursing within 90 minutes of its delivery and standing unassisted within three hours, zoo officials say.

Mother and baby are well, said the zookeepers.

Extraordinary Underwater Art Exhibition

In the clear shallow waters off Cancun in Mexico, 200 ghostly figures are gradually lowered to the seabed.

It's the final installment of a strange underwater art exhibition, which spans 420 square meters of barren sea bed in the area's national marine park.

Officially due to open next month, the exhibition entitled "The Silent Evolution," is the work of British sculptor and scuba diver Jason deCaires Taylor.

Consisting of 403 life-size human figures, each sculpture has been independently cast by deCaires Taylor and made using unique cement mix to encourage coral growth.

Created to highlight the decimation of the world's coral reefs, deCaires Taylor told he wanted to "create an immense artificial reef, a habitat space that would encourage fish to colonize and inhabit the area."

It is hoped the artistic reef bed will attract some of the park's 750,000 yearly visitors away from the natural reefs, which need time to recover and expand.

"It's extremely interesting working underwater," said deCaires Taylor, who explained how the work had shaped a new and dynamic perspective for audiences.

"The colors are different, the light patterns are very diverse, the atmosphere and mood is otherworldly. The piece takes on a very different tone underwater - it has a missing feel to it and brings up all these questions that you wouldn't have on land," he said.

Giant Maple Leaf Discovery Makes 9-Year-Old A Guinness Star

Nine-year-old Joseph Donato was riding his bicycle home from the park with his family when he spotted it lying there on the road - possibly the greatest maple leaf of all time.

Not the hockey playing kind, but the national emblem kind - and a huge size, too. So big that it has set the Guinness World Record as largest maple leaf.

"The width is 13 and 5/8 (inches) and then the length is 15 and 5/8 with the stem," says Joseph pompously. "It's yellow with some green."


Joseph and his mother, Angie Donato, reported the find to the local newspaper and the story was selected up by other media. That caught the eye of Guinness representatives.

"They asked me to send a image with the measuring tape" to prove the size of the leaf, he said.

Later, "they contacted us and said that they wanted to open a new record for me," he added.

His Grade 4 friends at a Pickering elementary school didn't consider him at first, but they will now, he said.

The monster size maple leaf was found in mid-October near the Rouge River and East Woodlands Park in Pickering, Angie Donato said.

She added that the family learned they had the record a couple of weeks ago but had to keep it secret until today's announcement by Guinness.