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, Blekko’s new feature doesn’t just surface ‘Likes’ next to already existant result URLs. You can actually change the results you see based on what your friends have ‘Liked’ by searching and adding the /Likes slashtag to any search, for example TechCrunch /Likes. → 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 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).
Blekko’s newly created search vertical, aptly called /safeshop, includes only human selected shopping sites and is designed to thwart spammers and malware distributors. So users can now just add /safeshop to any search to search for retail products on the web, effectively filtering out any rogue or untrusted retailers who may offer a poor experience for online shoppers. → 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 Blekko themselves. But, once you get past the goofy name and syntax, the idea of a category search deserves some exploration. → 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, along with 8,000 other people in the private beta (our beta review is here). Unlike the massive failure that was known as Cuil, the Blekko team isn’t out hyping the site as a Google-killer. Rather, Blekko is being positioned as a place for people to create and share their own search engines based on trusted websites, and to get deep insights into SEO via a very transparent ranking system. → 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 plantlike pods. The goal of these pod people is to work together in order to replace the entire human race. You may remember the scene when the star stares at the camera and yells: “They’re here already! You’re next!” → 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 you try to include in a search query, it defaults to Google.
In this regard, Slash ‘n’ Grab – we like the name by the way – can be thought of as a sort of poor man’s Blekko, the heavily funded U.S. search engine – totaling $20 million – backed by a number of well respected angel and venture investors in Silicon Valley. → Read More
There has been lots of buzz around Blekko, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups. At the recent Social Currency CrunchUp CEO Rich Skrenta gave an impressive demo of their product and attendees got a first glimpse of Blekko’s powerful search engine.
Slense, an Austrian startup, which has been developed by bunch of Viennese PhD students recently launched and is in some way a Blekko competitor. The company’s goal is to establish a customizable and private search experience. By adding sources you know and trust – for now, just RSS feeds and your Delicious stream – Slense only displays results deemed relevant to you. Results improve not based on your historical search behaviour but on the primary sources you add, and from those external sites, the content is analyzed and via some sort of “peer reviewing”, weighted for future searches. → Read More
Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp (which is currently being livestreamed here), Blekko founder and CEO Rich Skrenta gave the first live demo of the startup’s innovative search engine (be sure to check out our initial review). To mark the occasion, Blekko is giving out an invite to 500 lucky TechCrunch readers — just be one of the first people to email a message requesting an invite to techcrunch@blekko.com. → Read More
We just posted our first thoughts on Blekko, a new search engine preparing to launch to the public. We’ve also taken a screencast of the search experience on the site and have a short video interview with cofounders Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson. → Read More
It takes a crazier than average entrepreneur to go after the search market. There’s an entrenched player, Google, with 65% market share. Google is so powerful the second player, Yahoo, just bailed out of the market. And third place Microsoft is throwing billions of dollars around just to get in the game.
We’ve seen Wikia, Cuil and other well backed startups try and fail at search. Now Blekko is preparing to launch. Will they find success where everyone else has failed?
They’ve been working on Blekko for 2.5 years now – we first covered them in January 2008. Cofounder and CEO Rich Skrenta had just left his previous company, Topix. Blekko has raised three rounds of financing since then, totaling $20 million, from some of the most respected angel and venture investors in Silicon Valley.
Blekko remain in private alpha, although I’ve had the chance to test the engine over the last few days. They will shortly begin letting a few beta testers onto the site, and a full launch will happen later this summer. → Read More
Stealth search engine Blekko, which we’ve been tracking since early 2008, has closed another $2.5 million in funding, bringing the total raised to $20 million. This most recent round, says CEO Rich Skrenta, was a inside round led from existing investors USVP and CMEA Ventures.
Blekko is taking their own sweet time to launch, so don’t expect much more from them until they are good and ready. → Read More
One search engine dies, another takes a step forward. This is a hard space to find a niche in, but the money at stake if you succeed is staggering.
Blekko, the stealth search engine we’ve been covering since early 2008, has raised a third round of financing – $11.5 million from USVP and CMEA. That brings the total amount of capital raised to $17.5 million, including a $1 million credit line. Their last round was in March 2008.
We took a look at Blekko in late May. The company wants absolutely no press at all while they continue to bake the product, but we think there is something interesting under the hood. And apparently a few investors agree. → Read More
Life is not easy for search engine startups. FIrst, it’s hard to create something that doesn’t fall flat against Google. Too much hype (Google Killer!), whether the company drives it or not, inevitably leads to disappointment.
Cuil is walking dead, for example, and Wikia Search is just dead. Other ambitious projects like SearchMe are dealing with tepid user enthusiasm, and Wolfram Alpha’s over-hype has cost it credibility.
Any search engine startup with a shred of common sense wouldn’t want to create a lot of hype about itself before launching. There are too many dead bodies lying around to prove how badly that strategy works.
But on the other hand: ambitious startups need to hire talented engineers, and they need lots of money. Crawling and indexing the web is expensive and requires thousands of servers. Those servers aren’t free. So there needs to be at least a little awareness of the startup out there for hiring and fundraising purposes. → Read More
2008 is the year of the search engine startup. Hot on the heels of Powerset’s partial launch earlier this week, stealth search engine Blekko (no logo, no website, just this and, apparently, some technology) raised a second round of financing. The company raised $3 million in equity at a $23 million post-money valuation. All previous investors participated, and new investors Marc Andreessen, SoftTech VC and Western Technology Investment also invested. They simultaneously closed a $1 million lease line with Western Technology Investment for server leases. We don’t know much yet about Blekko, which was founded by former Topix founder/CEO Rich Skrenta. The company says they won’t be launching anything to the public until 2009. See our original post on Blekko for more background information. See our coverage of Cuill as well, another hot stealth search startup we’re tracking. CrunchBase Information Blekko Rich Skrenta Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
San Francisco based Powerset will be publicly launching a long-awaited beta version of the service in the coming weeks, the company told me yesterday. They are working on a new kind of search engine that will understand natural language searches and compete with keyword matching engines that dominate search today. An early version of the search engine, which was demo’d to me yesterday at their offices, has been available to some users of their Powerlabs site. But for the most part, it’s been kept very quiet. The early version of the service will serve as a showcase for the user interface and engine itself, but it will not have a full web index behind it. For now, Powerset will query only Wikipedia and Freebase. But when I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search. I’ll temper that statement since the company is not putting anything more than a tiny index of two sites behind the service for now. In particular, the fact that Powerset doesn’t have to bother with spam control and other relevance issues (which is what made Google so great when it launched), means it can’t yet be considered any kind of challenger in the search space. But anyone who uses it will be able to see the potential value of the engine when it is placed in front of a full web index. For now the company is keeping specific features of the engine confidential, but I can say it has evolved significantly since a screen shot was released in mid-2007. In preparation for the launch, some of the Powerset team have vowed not to shave until the product is released. They are chronicling their facial hair adventure on a site called Powerstache, which has been covered by Jessica Guynn at the LA Times. Rumors have also been swirling around the company in general. A number of sources have said that Powerset is pitching for additional capital. And the company also appears to have put plans to hire a new CEO on hold – founder Barney Pell is still firmly in charge at the company. Powerset is one of three new search engines that we’re keeping a close eye on. The other two, Cuill (pronounced “cool”) and Blekko, → Read More
Rich Skrenta, who created the first computer virus (Elk Cloner), co-founded the Open Directory Project, and co-founded online news site Topix, may have bitten off the biggest challenge of his career – taking on Google. In search. Skrenta left Topix last June. He started his new company, Blekko, almost immediately, along with five others from the Topix core team. They raised $2 million in seed funding in September from Baseline Ventures, two early Googlers (David DesJardins and Jeremy Wenokur), and the founding team. The company is still deep in stealth and, apparently, working out of a garage in true startup style (see image below). The Blekko website, which today has nothing on it except a picture of a puppet created by Skrenta’s daughter, isn’t even close to having a landing page up, let alone the final product. But eventually Skrenta says they’ll launch a full scale search engine to compete with the big guys. Skrenta, who’s very media savvy, won’t say much about how he’s going to tackle search (he’s not a fan of PageRank though:“PageRank wrecked the web. Google is the cause of all of this. and Google is going down with it.”). He says they are looking at improvements on the back end (indexing and query serving) as well as the user search experience itself. Beyond that, he says we have to wait. And it might be a long wait at that. The company, Skrenta says, may not have a public prototype available until 2009. Normally an entrepreneur announcing they’re taking on Google with a six person team and just $2 million in funding would either be laughed at or ignored. In Skrenta’s case, he has proven himself more than once as capable of taking on big challenges and winning. This will be a company to watch, and speculate on, in 2008. There are other promising search startups out there. Powerset, Cuill (we’ll be hearing more about them soon) and the upcoming Wikia Search Engine are all yet to launch. Mahalo is growing fast (but still tiny). Can anyone unseat Google? Perhaps not any time soon. But you don’t have to get much market share to be a huge winner in this space – every 1%, they say, is worth a cool billion dollars. CrunchBase Information Blekko Rich Skrenta Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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