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, 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.