The company says in a blog post, We launched izik, our search app for tablets, last Friday and are amazed at the responses we’ve received! Thanks to our users, on day one izik was the #1 free reference app on iTunes and #49 free app overall…We are delighted that there is such a strong desire to see something fresh and new in search, and that our vision with izik is so well received.”

“The twitterverse has been especially active in spreading the word about izik,” the company adds. “We’ve seen a lot of comments about the beautiful design and interface, the useful categories, and most importantly the high quality results that make izik a truly viable choice for searching on tablets.”

If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, take a look:

The app is also available for Android, and there’s a working web version, but izik was created specifically for tablets.

“Tablets are increasingly getting integrated into our lives, so we wracked our noggins to figure out how we could use our search technology to optimally serve tablet users,” the company says in a blog post. “Not surprisingly, our research revealed that tablets take on a very different role in our lives than laptops and desktops. Laptops are for work; tablets are for fun. Laptops are task-oriented (‘what’s the capital of Bulgaria?’); tablets are more exploratory (‘what’s Jennifer Lopez doing these days?).”

“So, our goal with izik was to move the task-oriented search product we all use on our computers (aka 10 blue links) and turn it into a more fun, tablet-appropriate product,” says blekko. “That means an image-rich layout with an appearance and experience very different than what we’re used to seeing on a laptop.”

The app makes use of tablet gestures, of course. You can swipe horizontally to view results within categories, swipe vertically on the page to find more categories, expand results to see more without leaving the page, swipe through expanded results and pages, and pinch to share on Facebook and Twitter.

Interestingly, the product appears to have no blekko branding on it whatsoever.

You can use izik on your desktop from the web at izik.com, but the app is available in the App Store and Google Play. What do you think?

“The holiday season is in full swing and blekko is getting into the giving spirit – donating metadata on search engine ranking for 140 million websites and 22 billion webpages to Common Crawl,” a spokesperson for blekko tells WebProNews.

“With this donation of spam-filtered metadata, blekko is helping Common Crawl ensure that their resources and man-hours are spent crawling real, useful webpages,” he adds.

Blekko says that web and search being open and transparent is “number one on the blekko bill of rights.” Yes, blekko has a bill of rights:

Through blekko’s API, blekko says Common Crawl will have access to the metadata from 140 million websites.

More about the initiative on blekko’s blog.

The suite includes page analysis, SEO report cards, inbound links organized by categories, Blekko crawler sections reports and domain reports, instant SEO data and direct SEO access from Blekko’s search engine, AdSense and IP hosting information, a full list of pages crawled, and PageSource and Cache.

It also includes full link reports of the following types: inbound links by host, live inbound links, all inbound links from a host, all inbound links to a specific URL, outbound links fro a page URL, internal links, and domain comparison of inbound links.

“The mission behind blekko has always be to offer full transparency on the web,” said Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. “Blekko’s premium SEO tools gives developers unique and often privately kept data about web domain content. Unlike other search engine analytic tools which only show general data oninbound links, our premium SEO tools provide full data reports that can be used to compare SEO stats between sites and direct SEO access from blekko search result pages.”

Blekko says it is able to provide its “up-to-the-minute” SEO tools because it is only one of four companies that can index the entire web. Blekko performs 120 million searches per month through 20 billion pages indexed. Over a hundred million of these are updated daily, Blekko says.

“Unlike other search sites that force social features to the search interface, blekko has created a new standalone social environment that enables the masses to curate content on the web,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews.

It does, however, utilize “search assets,” the company says, to let users engage with content. In fact, the site will provide social signals to the blekko search engine at some point. The company says it can use the signals to identify the highest quality content, and curate search results, while “pushing spam to the bottom”.

The site has a “news boards” concept for categories like sports, politics, fashion, tech, recipes, etc. Stories are voted up, and whatnot. A familiar concept, for sure. Here’s what it looks like:

“ROCKZi’s great content, its state of the art design, and its very intuitive, low touch set of tools, creates a social platform that brings curation to the masses,” says blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. “Everyone reading content from anywhere in the web can now also be curating it.”

It will be interesting to see what kind of user adoption ROCKZi is able to put together. Blekko says it had 5.5 million unique visitors to its search engine in May. These people made over 110 million searches.

“Blekko is now one of only a handful of search companies that has more than 4 billion pages indexed and crawls more than 100 million pages daily, with top sites being indexed hourly,” the representative says.

Blekko shared the following graphic with us:

“When it comes to pages crawled, the sweet spot for blekko is a little more than 4 billion pages and we update at least 100 million pages each day,” says blekko’s director of engineering, Robert Saliba. “As soon as our crawler, Scoutjet, crawls a webpage, users have access to information about it through blekko’s SEO product. We want to allow people to see the Internet the way a search engine sees it, especially what the rest of the internet is saying about an url.”

“Scoutjet updates the top ranked starting pages on the Internet around every hour, while other high quality pages are checked at least every week,” he explains. “The continuous updates to blekko’s SEO data include page content, meta data, duplicate text, and inbound link counts. Since staying up-to-date is as much about forgetting the old as finding the new, inbound links that are no longer live and duplicate content that is no longer available disappear.”

Saliba says blekko is bringing more machines into the service, since traffic continues to “grow rapidly”.

Blekko says it is is getting over 5.5 million unique monthly visitors (a 500% increase over the beginning of the year) and over 100 million queries per month.

Now, the “third search engine” is testing ads, according to a report from MediaPost. These ads, however, are coming from Google and Bing – AdSense and Microsoft’s counterpart. Laurie Sullivan reports:

Visitors who visit the search engine, however, probably will not see a search ad based on their query. Few are linked to slashtags, which helps to curate content, according to Rich Skrenta, Blekko founder and CEO.

“We’re still ironing out the kinks,” Skrenta said. The company will measure success based on RPMs — page revenue per 1000 ad units.

Meanwhile, Blekko’s peer (in terms of alternative search engines), DuckDuckGo, announced that it saw over a million searches in one day for the first time. (hat tip: SearchEngineLand)

Both alternative search engines announced new funding last fall. Blekko announced a $30 million investment from a mix of investors in September. In October, DuckDuckGo announced its first round of funding (the amount was not disclosed).

“That means users will get the benefit of curated search results (i.e. no spam!) for over 500 search categories, regardless of whether or not they manually append a slashtag to their query,” Blekko says in a blog post.

“As we head into 2012, our mission at blekko is more important than ever,” Blekko says. “If you think about it, prior to the internet the newspaper was the offline equivalent of the search engine. It was the starting spot where people went to get their news, job listings, personals, movies listings, classifieds, etc. Competing editorial voices were a hallmark of competition in the newspaper business and readers benefited because they had choice.”

They point to searches for “how to clean gutters” and “good table manners” to show off their new indexing.

Then, they suggest trying out their 3 Engine Monte tool, which lets you compare results with Bing and Google.

Blekko says it purposefully biases its index away from sites with low quality content, and that it’s source-based rather than link-based. “We purposefully bias our index away from sites with low quality content. “Regardless of how many people link to healthspamsite.com, we believe sites like the Mayo Clinic, NIH.gov, etc. are better sites. On blekko, brands trump links,” Blekko says.

Blekko secured a $30 million round of funding in September, which CEO Rich Skrenta told WebProNews the company would be used to expand and grow the service through hiring, infrastructure ,marketing, etc.

When asked if Blekko intends to expand into areas beyond search, he simply said, “We are focused on delivering great, spam-free search results.”

Earlier this month, Blekko did launch an analytics tool called Web Grepper.

Skrenta said that he wanted Blekko to be the “third” search engine (along with Google and Bing) back when it launched. I don’t know that it’s very widely considered that yet, but the investment can’t hurt the company’s quest to get there, especially if they will indeed remained focused on search.

Of course, Yahoo might have something to say about that “third search engine” thing. While it does use Bing to power its back-end, the company has been very vocal about how seriously it still takes search. Last week, they said they’re ready for a “search fight”. I don’t think Blekko was their main concern though.

Are the search engines headed in the right direction? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Cutts on Why Your PageRank Would Drop

While not exactly an announcement, Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts did post a video discussing reasons why Google Toolbar PageRank would drop. We talked about this a little bit more here, but you can hear exactly what he had to say in this video:

There is a part in there where he mentions that if you were caught selling links, but have stopped and want to earn Google’s trust back, you should submit a reconsideration request. On that note, Google announced that it is getting “more transparent” with its reconsideration requests.

Better Communication

“Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request,” explain Tiffany Oberoi and Michael Wyszomierski of Google’s Search Quality team in a joint blog post. “Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.”

“If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well,” they add. “Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it.”

Google says it’s not able to reply to individual requests with specific feedback, but that now webmasters will be able to find out if their site has been affected by a manual action and will know the outcome of the reconsideration review.

Google Using Blocked Site Data in Algorithm

Earlier this year, Google announced some new domain blocking features, which included a browser extension, and a link next to search results, which allow users to block sites that they don’t like. This was part of Google’s big quality clean up initiative, which also includes the Panda update and the +1 button. Initially, the sites blocked were on a personalized basis, but that is no longer completely the case. Google search quality engineer Johannes Henkel is quoted as saying, “We’ve also started incorporating data about sites people have blocked into our general search ranking algorithms to help users find more high quality sites.”

Pagination and View-All in Search Results

Google is “making a larger effort” to return single-page versions of content in search results, when the content is broken up among multiple pages. Think multiple page articles and content slideshows. Google says users tend to prefer single page versions of content, but sometimes these can load slowly, so there are also times when the multiple pages work better.

“So while a view-all page is commonly desired, as a webmaster it’s important to balance this preference with the page’s load time and overall user experience,” Google indexing team software engineers Benjia Li & Joachim Kupke say in a joint blog post on the Webmaster Central blog.

You can read more about the technical specs here. They summarize it all nicely: “Because users generally prefer the view-all option in search results, we’re making more of an effort to properly detect and serve this version to searchers. If you have a series of content, there’s nothing more you need to do.”

To better optimize your view-all page, you can use rel=”canonical” from component pages to the single-page version; otherwise, if a view-all page doesn’t provide a good user experience for your site, you can use the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes as a strong hint for Google to identify the series of pages and still surface a component page in results.

They talk even more about the specs of using rel=”next” and rel=”rev” in this post.

Rich Snippets for Apps

Google is also showing rich snippets for apps in search results now. They’re getting info for these from various places including: Android Market, Apple iTunes and CNET.

“Before you install a software application, you may want to check out what others think about it and how much it costs,” says product manager Alejandro Goyen. “Starting today, you’ll be able to get information about the applications, including review and price information, right in your search results.”

That’s something to consider if your business has an app. It’s a reputation factor.

Editing in YouTube

This isn’t exactly a search feature, but when you consider how big a role video can play in search marketing and that YouTube is the second largest search engine, it’s certainly worth your attention. YouTube has launched new editing tools that allow you to easy edit videos right from YouTube itself.

This should help you improve your videos, which are not only searchable on the second largest search engine and embeddable across the web, but often appear right in the results of regular Google searches. This new editing functionality will make it easier to try new things with less successful videos and potentially make them more viral.

Bing Adaptive Search

Ok, getting away from Google, Bing has launched adaptive search, which is essentially its version of personalized search. The company says it “helps decipher the intent and context of each search you conduct based on your search history.”

“The concept of personalized search is not a new idea, but Bing continues to focus on it and drive progress as the search space evolves,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. “In fact, Bing views personalized search as less of a ‘feature’ and more of what to expect from search.”
 
“Ultimately, the goal is to reduce ambiguity and help people find what they’re looking for more quickly,” he adds. “The personalization can be pretty subtle to the naked eye, but the more Bing learns about your intent the more personal it will become. And Bing also wants to be sure a diverse set of results still show up so people aren’t locked in a ‘filter bubble’. We think this provides a good balance.”

You’ve been dealing with this kind of thing with Google for quite some time, but it does throw in another SEO factor to consider for Bing, which as previously mentioned continues to gain market share.

WebProNews is interviewing Bing’s Stefan Weitz as I write this, so check back at WebProNews for more on this soon.

New Analytics Tool from Blekko

Finally, alternative search engine Blekko has released an interesting search analytics tool, which some of you might find useful. It’s called “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 company tells WebProNews. “For example, you could search to see how many pages request your user information when you visit, the types of  targeting information the site collecting, or how many sites have ‘Like’ vs ‘+1′ buttons, etc.”

Users can submit questions to the tool and the Blekko community votes on a daily basis on which questions will be analyzed.

These aren’t the only things going on in search this week, but these are some of the more noteworthy things that are likely to have a bigger impact on most site owners, than say things like Flight Search and Baseball scores.

Do any of these items concern you? Make your life easier? Let us know in the comments.