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). → 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 or /glutenfree, providing people with a curated result as well as insight into what recipes their friends like. → 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 the pudding, they say, and Blekko just served some pudding. Try out their new tool called 3 Engine Monte (derived from the popular 3 Card Monte confidence game. → 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 they’re from at a glance.
The company has also increased search relevance substantially by auto-including some 1,000 slash tags, up from just a handful previously. That means that for many results you are looking at hand picked sites that are known to have high quality content. Content farms just can’t get through slashtags.
Search for “pregnancy tips” and you’ll see to slash tags, for /pregnancy and /health, and quite good results compared to Google. But on Blekko you’re not done. Click on one of those slash tags to drill down into results relevant to that tag. Answer relevance goes even higher. On Google you’d have to visit the next page of results, or rephrase your query. Both are time consuming. → 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 retention and Bing is at six months, which is the European standard. In fact, Yahoo recently extended its data retention policy from 90 days to 18 months because it needed it to “compete” with Google in offering personalized recommendations. With this move Blekko is essentially saying, “Unlike Yahoo, we don’t need to compete.” Search engines like DuckDuckGo and Startpage do not collect any user info. → 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 respectable web property, which is why today’s announcement that it will be partnering with young search engine, Blekko, seems like an interesting move. Blekko only launched publicly back in November of last year, so the human-curated, slash-tagging search engine is still very much an unestablished entity. → 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 algorithm it calls “AdSpam”, Blekko investigates the quality of a doman’s content, as well as the type of ads it includes, to identify those of the lowest quality. Those that don’t pass muster get the boot — which should be music to any searcher’s ears. → 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. It follows an action earlier this year where they banned twenty content farms from their results.
They’re calling the new algorithm “AdSpam.” “One of the strongest signals that a page is spam is aggressive participation in self-service
online advertising networks,” says the company. When they compare low quality sites (based on existing signals) and see lots of keyword based ads alongside that content, it’s very likely to be blocked.
“Domains with low quality content plus keyword ads are “machines that print money,” says Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. “Machines that print money will be exploited.” → 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 Adsense, Blekko has gone the widget route, riding the wave of publicity surrounding the JC Penney paid links controversy . Perhaps the most useful tool in the suite, Blekko is emphasizing search transparency for websites by offering publishers a Link Roll Widget, an easily embeddable way to “show off” the organic links to their sites much like they show off retweets or Facebook “Likes,” among other things. → 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 Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it. → 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 years has passed. I receive about 400 e-mails a day now from people all over the world. E-mail has become part of my life and has changed the way I communicate and the way I work. I don’t know anyone anywhere who doesn’t have an e-mail address. When I went to Sikkim, India, last year, a Buddhist monk in a remote Himalayan monastery even gave me his e-mail address. The web has also evolved in a similar fashion—it seems to be everywhere and connects everyone, for everything. Internet technologies are now toppling dictatorships in the Middle East. → 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, growing over the years, but it sort of feels like pre-Google again. Search is a really bad overall experience. Travel searches, for example, are a joke, and startups like Gogobot are popping up to try to fix that. When I’m trying to figure out the best hotel for me when I travel I bail on Google entirely and head to Tripadvisor (shudder), and Gogobot.
Same for gadget product reviews. GDGT, Amazon and occasionally Consumer Reports seem to have the best collections of data, so I just go there directly and bypass Google. In fact, I use Google mostly for navigation, not discovery these days. Meaning I know the document I’m trying to find and figure out the best search query to locate it. But pure discovery? It’s a shit show of layer upon layer of SEO madness vying for my click. → 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 made the decision that it would block content farms like Demand Media’s eHow and AnswerBag and now is announcing another milestone, over 30 million search queries in January and over 110K slashtags created since its launch in November. This breaks down to about 10-15 search queries a second and over 1 million searches a day, which is at levels over its original traffic spike at launch. In contrast, Google was serving over 88 billion searches a month at last count (the 2010 Comscore numbers have yet to come out as far as I can see). → 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 them they can make money from. All of these players are raking in billions of dollars at our expense.
I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion this week between Google, Microsoft, and Blekko. The event, which I emceed, was called Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, and was organized by BigThink and Microsoft. As I joked, it seemed odd that Google was playing the role of “evil” monopolist; Microsoft, the “good” contender, whilst Blekko was a fly on the wall. → 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 this would get Google’s attention. And I had the same concern as when I challenged the Russian government, once, in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek article about Skolkovo (a new tech park). I feared that Google would either blacklist me or do its equivalent of putting me in a Gulag—deliver even more spam when I search websites. → 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 results, and didn’t test his own Wolfram Alpha because it is not designed for those kinds of queries.
What he found is that the search engines did fairly well, depending on how you measure success. Google did slightly better than the rest, but Bing and Ask were close behind. On average, Google got the correct answer somewhere on its first results page 69 percent of the time, versus 68 percent for Ask and 63 percent for Bing. Google got the right answer somewhere in the title or snippet of text of the very top result 66 percent of the time, versus 65 percent for Bing (and Ask dropped to 51 percent). → 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 thing, and growing nicely.
Now, though, they’ve gone Hollywood. Ashton Kutcher (image is from TechCrunch50 2008), whose movie is currently no. 1 in box offices, is making a somewhat more geeky splash today. He’s invested $200,000 in Blekko, as an extension to the company’s most recent round of funding. → 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 founders didn’t have LinkedIn accounts, and others didn’t respond to our LinkedIn “inmails”. So I instructed my students to use Google searches to research each founder’s work history, by year, and to track him or her down in that way.
But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
