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…
Blekko Gets New Crawl Technology, Adds Real Time SEO Updates
Alternative search engine blekko announced today that it has integrated new crawl technology to power its search index, and is now claiming to offer more comprehensive, real time updates to its SEO pages. This, a representative for the company tells…
Blekko Gets Ads, DuckDuckGo Gets A Million Searches In A Day
Blekko sought out from the start to become the “third search engine” behind Google and Bing (Yahoo, for all intents and purposes counted as Bing, since Bing powers Yahoo Search). Google and Bing serve search ads to monetize their efforts.…
Blekko Gets Search Index Update, Redesign
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 Gets New Funding ($30 Million)
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,…
Google and Bing Changes You Need to Know About
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 Launches “Web Grepper” Analytics Tool
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…
Today in Alternative Search Engines (Blekko, Wolfram Alpha)
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 CEO Rich Skrenta Discusses Search Quality, Filtering, Zorro Update
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”.…
Blekko Refreshes Itself, Challenges Users to a Game of 3 Engine Monte
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 Powers Search for Flipboard
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…