Search engine Blekko has raised $30 million in new funding Yandex, MLC Private Equity, and existing investors U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Capital and PivotNorth Capital (Ashton Kutcher is also a previous investor). This brings Blekko’s total funding to $55 million. Yandex’s CEO Arkady Volozh will join Blekko’s board.
Blekko launched last year as the shiny new search engine that wanted to take on Google. The search engine differentiates itself from Google by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can’t do elsewhere. Blekko offers unique query refinement tools to human editors called Slashtags (i.e. /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs) to filter results to what you are looking for (you can read our full review of the platform here).
Earlier this year the search company expanded its efforts to eliminate spam from search results and banned pages from well-known content farms as well as blocking pages from 1.1 million domains that were generating spam. The company has also signed partnerships with Topix, fellow search engine DuckDuckGo and recipe search engine Foodily.
Blekko has also integrated social data into results, as well as Facebook comments. The company also considering integrating Twitter data into results as well.
Volozh says of Blekko: “We love blekko and think it’s a great product – a quality search engine that organically combines search algorithms with expert opinions. We believe the outlook for this approach is strong and that the blekko team is poised to make it a success.”
“Yandex is a partner and investor that shares our mission of making search the best experience it can be,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of blekko. “Having access to one of the world’s top pools of search talent and the fantastic products they have built will help us grow blekko in the U.S.”
The search engine currently indexes approximately 3.5 billion URLs, which pales in comparison to Bing and Google, which are both over 15 billion. But one of the key advantages to using Blekko is that it is such a thorough spam blocker.
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.
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