Blekko announced an update to the search index, a site re-design and the addition of automated slashtags to over 500 categories. “That means users will get the benefit of curated search results (i.e. no spam!) for over 500 search categories, …

Blekko has secured a new $30 million investment from a mix of investors (some old, some new), including Russian search engine Yandex. CEO Rich Skrenta tells WebProNews, “Money will be used to expand and grow the service – hiring, infrastructure, …

There have been a whole lot of announcements from the major search engines this week, that all webmasters should be aware of – especially from Google, because while its market share may have slipped slightly (while Bing-powered search has grown …

Blekko announced the launch of a new search analytics tool Web Grepper. “The Web Grepper searches for unique data information and trends that are embedded in code and cannot be found on any other search engine,” a spokesperson for the …

Blekko announced today that it has teamed up with Foodily on recipe search. Foodily, a social recipe network, will curate Blekko’s search results for recipes, which the company calls “a cluttered and spam rich environment on most search engines”. “Search …

Blekko, the alternative search engine that aims to challenge Google and Bing by reducing spam and low quality content in search results via human curation, has refreshed its index and results pages in an update it refers to as “Zorro”. …

Alternative search engine Blekko has launched a major update, called “Zorro,” which includes an expanded search index with integration of the slashtags, which have been the staple of the site. On the new results pages, users will see sites that …

Blekko announced today that it is now powering RSS search for the popular iPad app Flipboard. The functionality is designed to weed out spam as blekko’s slashtag method of searching does, so Flipboard users can discover good content based on …

Google’s Matt Cutts used a new webmaster video to share his thoughts about alternative search engines Blekko and DuckDuckGo. Long story short, he thinks you should check them out, and see what you like and don’t like about them. The …

Blekko announced some new privacy settings this morning. Personal info (like IP addresses) will now be retained for a maximum of 48 hours. That compares to the 18-month policy employed by Google (and Yahoo), and the 6-month policy employed by …

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 …

It’s no secret that search and social are overlapping more and more. In fact, Ted Ulle of Converseon told us last year that he believed the two would eventually unite and be called something like, integrated media marketing, or IMM.

Blekko is now including integration with Facebook Comments in its search results. Users who login with their Facebook accounts can communicate Based on the comments we received on a recent article about the potential Facebook data could have in Google …

Interesting news from Blekko today. The alternative search engine, focused on weeding out spam from search, has partnered with one of the top sites impacted by Google’s Panda update – MerchantCircle. MerchantCircle is a small business community site with 1.6 …

Blekko has partnered with SEO platform BrightEdge to fight search spam. Blekko is giving BrightEdge access to real-time link graph information, so companies can verify that their own links are legitimate as well as whether sites ranking ahead of them …

Blekko has launched a new AdSpam algorithm it says is the first of its kind created to find spam rather than rank results. The algorithm is aimed at flagging pages which are spam and zapping them before they appear in …

Community-driven search engine Blekko has introduced new publisher tools focused on link transparency and customized search via Blekkogear. One of the new tools is called Blekko Link Roll, an embeddable site widget that shows links to a site in real …

Blekko just announced it is now using the Stack Overflow community to help improve and maintain programming-related slashtags for its search engine. Stack Overflow, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is a programming Q&A site built by programmers for other programmers. 

Today, DuckDuckGo has started "hard wiring" wikiHow as the first result on its search engine results pages for how-to queries. 

wikiHow founder Jack Herrick (who also ran eHow before selling to Demand Media) tells WebProNews, "As you know, there is tons of buzz on the web about what Google’s next step will be with tackling low quality content from content farms."

Blekko says its search queries climbed to a million a day in January. CEO Rich Skrenta tells WebProNews that Blekko has seen growth since its announcement that it has banned some content farms from its index. 

The Google vs. Bing search wars continues to rage on, and there’s no reason to assume it will go away anytime soon. More and more takes on the subject are coming out, and the storyline is getting more dramatic with each addition. 

When Google’s Matt Cutts recently posted on his personal blog about an algorithm update, many people took that to mean that this was geared at cracking down on content farms, as the phrase "content farms" had made an appearance in another post on the Google blog before that.