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New player 'Blekko' enters search engine market
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 04 November 2010, 08:42 IST
Washington: Another startup has stepped into the Internet search engine market. Blekko, the latest search engine is currently available as a beta version that utilizes human patterns for search results unlike other engines like Google that uses computer algorithms.
Instead of a computer algorithm, Blekko uses tag pages to let users search. It uses a feature it calls "slashtags" allowing users to specify their searches to only the most trusted and most relevant sites, cutting out spam sites and sites of poor quality.
As the users in Wikipedia keep the online encyclopedia up to date by adding and changing entries as needed, the users of Blekko are also in charge of assigning tags such as 'colleges', 'autos' and 'recipes' to Web pages indexed by the site.
Backed by millions in venture capital, Blekko was launched on November 1. The company has received $24 million in funding from U.S. Venture Partners and CMEA Capital, as well as angel investors including Marc Andreessen.
"When we started this company our goal was to build a search engine that not only let you do your usual searches but also lets you do searches that you just can't do anywhere else," Rich Skrenta, Chief Executive of Blekko said.
Blekko also pledged full transparency with its search ranking data, showing how it ranks sites for any particular query. According to Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of technology blog SearchEngineLand.com, Blekko can be expected to be a Google killer as for those who seek an alternative for when Google or Bing don't come through, the debutant can be a favoured choice.