Blekko announced that it will begin powering the search functionality on local news aggregation site Topix, calling it “an unprecedented partnership for a search engine not yet six months old.”

That Topix is turning to such a young search engine to power its entire site search, particularly as competition grows in the local content space, is certainly a ringing endorsement. As Google has proven, search is an incredibly important tool for news consumption. That said, it is worth noting that Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta is the former CEO/co-founder of Topix.

“It is rather unprecedented for a search start up to be able to power search on a site of scope and scale as Topix,” said Skrenta. “We have a long history of collaboration and camaraderie with the Topix team so it’s a thrill to be working together again in bringing a new search experience to Topix users.”

Watch our recent interview with Skrenta:

“We truly believe that curated search is the future of the Web and we’re proud to bring that experience directly to Topix pages and directly to our users,” said Topix CEO Chris Tolles. “The team at blekko knows our users and our content extremely well and this background will help in delivering a very powerful search experience to our users.”

The curation Tolles speaks of would be the slashtags Blekko users create to curate sets of search results organized around specific topics. According to Blekko, users have created over 110,000 slashtags since the search engine’s launch.

Topix currently has over 360,000 edited news pages featuring content from over 50,000 sources made up of newspapers, blogs, radio and TV stations, government, magazines, and corporate information sites.