Once I had created a slashtag, I could choose to keep it private or share it (so that other Blekko users could also use it for searching). So far, so good. But after this, I started to run into the beta issues of Blekko.
First, if I had defined a slashtag as public, I couldn't go back and make it private later. I had to delete the slashtag and re-create it as private. But the biggest problem was the searches themselves. Using some of the slashtags I created, the results often didn’t make sense to me. The web sites (that were in the slashtag) that should have come up at top were often nowhere to be seen. Also, in some cases, sites from the slashtag that I knew had good content related to the search failed to appear at all in the results.
Of course, this is a new search engine, still in beta, and these types of glitches are to be expected. And there are some very nice features in Blekko for easily sorting searches by date, for getting SEO data on sites and for integrating with website APIs (for example, it has some nice features for searching Amazon).
But this beta still has a lot of problems (and I'm not even talking about how the product name resembles the noise kids make when eating broccoli), and it will definitely need time before it is a viable search option.