Blekko, the alternative search engine that launched back in 2010, unveiled a major redesign today that uses some of its “slashtag” technology to help users go beyond the usual ten blue links on its competitors search results pages. Blekko now automatically breaks its results down into different categories of curated content. Say you are searching for “wine,” the search… → Read More
ROCKZi, the social news service launched in July by search startup Blekko, has released a new feature allowing users to embed their “news boards” on other websites.
VP of Marketing Mike Markson describes this as a way for people to showcase their knowledge in a given field, without actually having to constantly hunt down new content. For example, EarthEcho, the environmental nonprofit founded… → Read More
Even though Digg was once known as the next big thing in social news site, it was torn down and sold in small pieces. Yet, part of the concept still lives on. The search engine Blekko just launched ROCKZi, a visually compelling way to consume and interact with the fresh content that users care about the most. After selecting the category that you want to read (Geekery, The BiZ, Glitterati…), you… → Read More
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… → Read More
Since I am our resident steward of infographics I figured I might as well highlight the creation of the very first Blekko infographic (below), brought to you by our friends over at Cognitive SEO. CLICK THROUGH FOR FOURTEEN THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT BLEKKO … → Read More
After announcing its Zorro visual revamp and its Three Search Engine Monte challenge, Blekko is announcing today that it’s partnered with recipe search engine Foodily in order to curate its recipe search results.
As of today. users who search on Blekko for things like Kale Chips or Grilled Fennel will tap into the Foodily community’s curation for foodie-related slashtags like /recipe /nocarbs… → Read More
Search engine Blekko is pretty excited about their new Zorro launch that I just wrote about. All new design, a move from red to blue links and a general declutterfication is just the shiny stuff on top. Underneath there’s a new web index and they’re really putting those slashtags to work – about 1,000 of them are now auto-added to appropriate results pages.
But enough tech jargon. The proof is in… → Read More
Ok, I got a little over excited in the title. But the new version of search engine Blekko, called Zorro and launching right now, is pretty cool. There have been big improvements visually. Gone are the red links of the previous version along with most of the left sidebar clutter. In fact, that left sidebar is gone and has been replaced with small icons next to search results to tell you what site… → Read More
Search engine Blekko, ever eager to differentiate itself and make headlines with its countless product development advances, is announcing today that it will reduce its data retention period to 48 hours, retaining far less user personal information (like IP addresses) than the the dominant players in the space.
For comparison, competitors Google and Yahoo are currently at 18 months of user data… → Read More
Topix, the largely under-the-radar platform for local news, information, and influence, has been aggregating local news and community discussions for nearly 7 years. Over this time, the platform has quietly grown to over 13 million monthly visitors, according to Quantcast. It’s now aggregating local content from more than 50K sources and offers more than 360K edited news pages.
Topix has become a… → Read More
Ever since its launch in November 2010, Blekko has been on a mission to eliminate spam and content farms from search results. The human-curated search engine, which is also known both for using actual mammals to edit search results and for its employ of slashtags for easy categorization, announced in March that it had banned over 1 million spammy domain names from its results. Using a new… → Read More
Search engine Blekko says they’ve banned some 1.1 million spammy domain names from their search results. The banned domains are the result of a new algorithm the company has developed that looks at both poor quality content as well as the types of ads that the domains include along with the content. It’s part of their ongoing war, they say, against content farm and other very low quality content. → Read More
Search engine Blekko is taking its initiative to insert itself into the news as much as possible one step further today, and is launching a Blekkogear hub for its publishing tools, presenting a suite of search-related iframe embeds (sorry Wordpress users!) for publishers as well as its already existing toolbar and other goodies.
Instead of coming up with its own version of Google Analytics or… → Read More
What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?
This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.
The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social… → Read More
I sent my first e-mail message in 1995, to a member of my development team. That was the only person I knew who had an e-mail address in those days. I also did my first web search around that time. I think I used Lycos for this. I entered some keywords into a text box, separated by Boolean operators, and received a list of web pages that I could click on that referenced these words.
Sixteen… → Read More
A decade ago I tried Google for the first time. Like everyone said, it was magic – the result I wanted was right there at the top. For someone who’d been using AltaVista for years before that it was a very pleasant experience. Anyone who was on the Internet before Google came along knows exactly what I’m talking about. Google just felt right. It got the job done.
It’s been a creeping feeling… → Read More
Nowhere has the need for a more diverse search market been more apparent than this week’s revelation that Bing was cribbing Google’s notes. While Microsoft VP Harry Shum and Google’s Matt Cutts squabbled on a panel together at the Farsight 2011 conference, Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta looked on, more a human symbol of the call for greater market diversity than anything else.
Earlier in the week Blekko… → Read More
I wrote about the epic battles that are brewing between spammers and content farms—which are turning the web into a massive garbage dump—and search providers, which have to choose between profit and customer satisfaction. This is a serious problem. The content farms are “dumbing down” the web by churning out thousands of mostly low-quality articles, every day, on topics that Google tells… → Read More
Blekko, the search engine that is fighting the good fight against web spam with human editors, is joining biggies Google and Bing in the mobile search arena today with an Android and iPhone application double whammy. Says Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta, “In a world where people want the most relevant answers on the go, mobile search is becoming increasingly more significant.” → Read More
Sometimes, all it takes is a little spark to set off a major forest fire. That is what seems to have happened with my New Year’s Day post on Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. Over the last two months, there has been an avalanche of articles echoing my post, including New York Magazine, Business Insider, GigaOm, TechCrunch, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal.
I had a feeling that… → Read More
The recent victory of IBM’s Watson computer against human competitors in an exhibition round of Jeopardy got computer scientist Stephen Wolfram thinking about how regular search engines might fare in such a match-up. So he took 200,000 known Jeapardy clues and ran them through six search engines (Google, Bing, Ask, Blekko, Wikipedia Search, and Yandex). He excluded known Jeopardy sites from the… → Read More
Blekko, a search engine, isn’t exactly a flashy new startup. There’s the name for starters – it was something they came up with as a placeholder while they were stealth and decided that was a good long term name, too.
And then there was the whole Cuil fiasco. Which would make any new search startup blanch. So Blekko hasn’t turned on the hype machine at all. They’re just quietly doing their… → Read More
This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders. Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which provided a wealth of information. But some of the… → Read More
As of today search engine Blekko has made search a little bit more social, letting users log in through Facebook and using Facebook API data to let you know what sites your friends have ‘Liked’ as well as search those sites. Just connect to Blekko through Facebook, wait a few minutes for your “Likes” to load and begin searching with the /Likes slashtag.
Unlike Bing’s Facebook ‘Like’ integration… → Read More
Blekko, the shiny new search engine that is taking on Google, is getting into product search today with the launch of a new vertical for holiday shopping. As you may have heard, the recently launched search engine differentiates itself from Google by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can’t do elsewhere.The search engine offers unique query refinement tools to human… → Read More
So, LeWeb ’10 is coming up. Let’s say you’re looking for some good ideas of where to stay and what to do in Paris while you’re there. Where are you most likely to turn on the web? Google. A search for “paris vacation” yields TripAdvisor as the top result. You click on that link.
Oh. My. God. → Read More
We recently brought Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta into our office to talk about why his company’s recent attempt to enter a market where two search engines hold 90% of the market share is not completely insane. The prevailing “Blekko is doomed” argument holds that because Google already does search so well, it’s fruitless to for anyone else to bother.
Granted, it’s hard to imagine a future where people… → Read More
Blekko, the shiny new search engine that we first started covering way back in 2008 when they had a hand puppet as their mascot, is preparing to launch. Next Monday, November 1, they’ll turn the lights on and let anyone in.
If you’re really raring to get in at the first possible moment, the site will technically go live at 9 pm California time on Sunday evening.
We’ve been testing it since July… → Read More
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Michael Markson, VP of Marketing for internet search engine Blekko, Inc. Previously, Markson was founder and VP of Business Development of news site Topix.
In the 1956 classic horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the citizens of the fictional town of Santa Mira, California are replaced by perfect physical duplicates, simulations grown from… → Read More
Slash ‘n’ Grab has launched as a simple way to search some of the most popular sites on the web from a single interface.
Simply type the name of the site you want to search, followed by a slash and the term that you’re searching for. So, for example, if you want to search TechCrunch for, say iPhone 4, you would type “TechCrunch/iPhone 4″. If, however, Slash ‘n’ Grab doesn’t know of a site that… → Read More
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