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…
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…
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,…
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 Queries on the Rise, More So Since Content Farm Blocking
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.
Blekko CEO On The “Useless Garbage” Of The Web
Late last week, Blekko launched the Spam Clock – the search engine’s illustration of how quickly the web is being flooded with spam. More specifically, it counts up the number of spam pages added to the web since January 1. What is not so clear by looking at it, however, is just what Blekko is considering spam (though the page does remind us that spammers are out to: harm users, steal publisher traffic, and defraud advertisers.