Blekko, the little search engine that could, has just come off the success of hitting one million search queries day and 30,000 slashtags (human curated search topics like /colleges, /vegan, /blogs) created in it’s first week of existence.
Now it has taken a unique “if you can’t beat them, join ‘em” approach to the search and hooked up with fellow market outlier DuckDuckGo, which like Blekko, is a search engine that prides itself on having more relevant results than Google or Bing with the added bonus of not keeping any of your personally identifiable info.
“Both our companies share the same mission of eliminating spam from search so that users get information from the best and most relevant sources on the Web,” said Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta.
As of today Blekko will incorporate DuckDuckGo’s Zero-Click Info summaries on a site by site basis, which can be ironically accessed by yes clicking on “info” in the search results while you’re on Blekko and show up at the top of your query page while on DuckDuckGo.
DuckDuckGo search results will now be powered by Blekko for the following heavy hitting searches: “personal finance,”"lyrics,”"recipes,”"hotels,”"health,”"colleges,” and “autos.” Blekko itself has been experimenting with auto-applying slashtags to these categories in order to improve queries, for example using the slashtag /health to cull better results for the search “cure for colds.”
DuckDuckGo users will also be able to search for the most recent results with /date, which is actually my favorite feature on Blekko and is especially useful if you’re looking for news articles or blog posts or any thing chronological.
Blekko has come up with some highly original ways to keep users coming back (check out its SEO tools) and I wouldn’t be surprised if DuckDuckGo isn’t the last partnership we see from the well coffered search engine. Says Skrenta“We got a lot of money in the bank [$24 million to be exact] so we’re not going anywhere.”
You can check out our TCTV interview with Skrenta here and our full review of Blekko here.
Blekko is a search company founded by Rich Skrenta and his core team from previous company Topix and Netscape’s Open Directory. Blekko was founded halfway through 2007 and has already earned itself an angel round from Baseline Ventures and two ex-Googlers.
DuckDuckGo is a search engine, like Google. Use it to get more Zero-click Info, more privacy, less spam, !bang syntax and lots of other goodies.
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