Back in 2010, an alternative search engine called Blekko emerged. It came from Rich Skrenta, co-founder & former CEO of Topix and NewHoo (which went on to become The Open Directory Project or DMOZ). It aimed to crowd source search…
FTC Updates Search Engine Ad Disclosure Guidelines
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has updated is guidance to the search engine industry regarding the need to distinguish between advertisements and search results. Search industry veteran Danny Sullivan wrote a letter to the FTC just over a year ago…
Blekko Launches Izik For Smartphones, Adds Local Search Feature
Blekko has just launched a new smartphone version of its mobile search product izik, which until now was only for iPad and Android tablets. The app, now available in Apple’s App Store and in Google Play, tries to emulate the…
Blekko Raises New Funding, Reduces Staff
Blekko has both reduced its staff and raised new funding. According to a report from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land, who had an email exchange with CEO Rich Skrenta, the company laid off eight people earlier this week as…
Blekko Gets A Big Redesign
Alternative search engine Blekko announced the launch of a major site redesign today. The design leverages the API the company built for its mobile app izik, and breaks search results down into categories, offering curated results from “verified” sources of…
izik Gets A Warm Reception On iTunes
Last week, Blekko launched a new search app for tablets called izik (pronounced EYE-zik), and apparently it’s received a decent amount of buzz for its debut. The app debuted as the top free reference app on iTunes. The company says…
Blekko Reimagines Search Again With izik
Blekko announced that it has launched a new search app for tablets called izik (pronounced EYE-zik). The company says it was built specifically with the iPad and Android tablets in mind. “Tablets are increasingly getting integrated into our lives, so…
Blekko Makes “Donation” Of Search Data To Common Crawl
Alternative search engine blekko announced today that it is “donating” 22 billion pages’ metadata to Common Crawl, a non-profit foundation, which maintains an open crawl of the web for access and analysis by anyone who cares. “The holiday season is…
Blekko Launches New Suite Of SEO Tools
Blekko announced the launch of a new suite of premium SEO tools today. The suite features a re-designed user interface, and a number of new features. The suite includes page analysis, SEO report cards, inbound links organized by categories, Blekko…