Blekko Works With Lavasoft on Spam-Free Search

The search engine Blekko is not content to be the underdog. It wants to be your guard dog too. The start-up continues to embrace its motto as “the spam-free search engine.” Since it began in November 2010, Blekko has tried to position itself as the safest of the three algorithmic search engines on the market, the others being giants — Microsoft’s Bing service and that little company called Google. read more

Mar 23, 2012

Blekko Closes $30 Million Funding Round; Welcomes Yandex as Strategic Investor

Blekko, the search engine striving to eliminate spam from search results, announced today that Europe's largest internet company Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX) will make a strategic investment in the Silicon Valley search start up. Additional investors in the $30 million funding round were Australian investor, MLC Private Equity, and existing investors U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Capital and PivotNorth Capital. read more

Sep 29, 2011

From Russia with love: Yandex backs US search startup Blekko with $15 million, computing power

The alliance announced Thursday marks the first time Yandex has invested in a U.S. search service, according to Arkady Borkovsky, chief technology officer of Yandex’s Silicon Valley lab. Yandex and its 3,000 employees hope to learn more about the nuances of U.S. search requests from Blekko. read more

Sep 29, 2011 by Associated Press

Oh Good Grep! Web Grepper: A New Web Intelligence Feature From Blekko

Web Grepper allows users to run searches on the ENTIRE Blekko to reveal data that you could not search and find using keywords. In other words, you can also search material in the actual HTML coding of a web page. read more

Sep 14, 2011 by Gary Price

Be The Mark In Blekko’s 3 Engine Monte

I’ve played it a few times and can beat it just about every time. The key is to look for certain signals, like the inclusion of content farm stuff. It still appears high in Google and Bing results, but you won’t see it at all in Blekko. Give it a try, and good luck. read more

June 21, 2011 by Michael Arrington

Blekko Slashes More Spam With “Zorro” Update

Most people who use Blekko don’t take advantage of the slashtag creation capability, but Skrenta and company have been trying make them available to Blekko users at large. The Zorro update means that slashtag-related results will now automatically appear at or near the top of a wide range of SERPs. read more

June 21, 2011 by Greg Sterling

Slash Through Spam With Blekko’s Zorro Update!

Ok, I got a little over excited in the title. But the new version of search engine Blekko, called Zorro and launching right now, is pretty cool. There have been big improvements visually. Gone are the red links of previous the version along with most of the left sidebar clutter. In fact, that left sidebar is gone and has been replaced with small icons next to search results to tell you what site they’re from at a glance. read more

June 21, 2011 by Michael Arrington

The Blekko Boom: Hottest Search Engine You’ve Never Heard of Inks Flipboard Deal

On Blekko, searchers double as editors, helping the upstart search engine refine and curate the best websites for any given query. The people-centric formula is antithetical to the typical machine-driven approach ... read more

May 17, 2011 by Jennifer Van Grove

An Engine’s Tall Order: Streamline the Search

Blekko uses a search algorithm like Google’s or Bing’s but also gets humans, mostly volunteers, to identify the sites they know, trust and visit most often and to put those at the top of the search results. read more

May 7, 2011 by Damon Darlin

Names You Need To Know: Blekko

Search is supposed to be for big companies with thousands of engineers: Google, market capitalization $169 billion, versus Microsoft, at $216 billion. Enter Blekko, which has 25 employees, and spent less than $25 million since its 2007 founding. Last summer Blekko launched a search engine that has been gaining significant traffic by a war on useless Web sites.read more

May 2, 2011 by Quentin Hardy

Blekko Taps Stack Overflow Community to Curate Programming, Tech Slashtags

Blekko has tapped the Stack Overflow community to help improve and maintain programming-related slashtags, curating the very best programming search verticals. Stack Overflow has quickly risen to become the pre-eminent programmer community on the Web and will now help Blekko return only the most relevant programming search results. read more

Anti-Spam Search Engine Blekko Averaging 1 Million Queries Per Day

Blekko’s alternative, human-curated search engine now averages 1 million queries a day and between 10 to 15 queries per second just three months after launch, according to January figures the startup released Monday read more

February 2, 2011 by Jennifer Van Grove

Blekko Bans Content Farms Like Demand Media's eHow From Its Search Results

Blekko, the perky little search engine startup that lets you customize your search results, is taking the fight against web spam to a new level. It already allows searchers to mark results as spam and keeps a spam clock that counts how many spam pages are on the web (743 million and counting). Now it is about to block content farms like Demand Media’s eHow and Answerbag entirely. The top 20 sites its users have marked as a source of web spam will now be blocked read more

January 31, 2011 by Erick Schonfeld

Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google

In addition to providing regular search capabilities like Google’s, Blekko allows you to define what it calls “slashtags” and filter the information you retrieve according to your own criteria. Slashtags are mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic, such as health, finance, sports, tech, and colleges. So if you are looking for information about swine flu, you can add “/health” to your query and search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands spam sites. read more

January 1, 2011 by Vivek Wadhwa

Blekko Gets Into Product Search With New Holiday Shopping Vertical /Safeshop

Blekko, the shiny new search engine that is taking on Google, is getting into product search today with the launch of a new vertical for holiday shopping. As you may have heard, the recently launched search engine differentiates itself from Google by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can’t do elsewhere... read more

November 29, 2010 by Leena Rao

Blekko Partners Up With Search Engine DuckDuckGo

Blekko, the little search engine that could, has just come off the success of hitting one million search queries day and 30,000 slashtags (human curated search topics like /colleges, /vegan, /blogs) created in it’s first week of existence... read more

November 23, 2010 by Alexia Tsotsis

A New Search Engine, Where Less Is More

In the week since it launched, new search engine Blekko has handled one million search queries per day, the company tells us. Its early users have also created 30,000 'slashtags' -- the custom search filters that serve as Blekko's main differentiator from Google and Bing... read more

November 9, 2010 by Nick Saint

A New Search Engine, Where Less Is More

Start-ups and big companies alike have tried to take on Google by building a better search engine. That they have failed has not stopped brave new entrants. The latest is Blekko, a search engine that will open to the public on Monday... read more

November 1, 2010 by Claire Cain Miller

Blekko's Skrenta Interview

Rich Skrenta, chief executive officer of Blekko Inc., talks about how the new online search engine differs from Google Inc.'s search site and Microsoft Corp.'s Bing. Skrenta speaks with Matt Miller on Bloomberg Television's "Street Smart." read more

November 1, 2010

With Help from You, New Search Engine Slashes Through Spam

Ignore for a minute the awkward name: Blekko. Instead, behold that as of late Sunday afternoon, there’s a new search engine in town that’s got a fresh approach to weed out the ever-proliferating junk and spam sites polluting search results... read more

November 1, 2010 by Ryan Singel

Search engine Blekko to rely on the human touch

A small Silicon Valley company with some big name backers will release a test version of a new search engine that the company says has a key ingredient that is missing from Google, the human touch. According to Blekko, the Web has increasingly become saturated with spam-like... read more

by Alexei Oreskovic

Blekko: The Newest Search Engine

Yes, Google is great, but Blekko, which relies on human input, may be better. Blekko.com, a new search engine that uses human input to help it sort out the world, is getting a lot of press today, including a lot of "Another search engine, who needs it? Google is better." send-offs... read more

by John C. Dvorak

Power to the People

A new search engine, Blekko, uses human editors to promote quality pages and block spam content from its results. The Web isn't kind to new search engines. Several newcomers, including Cuil, SearchWikia, and Searchme, have... read more

by Tom Simonite

Alternative search engine Blekko launch

Blekko's alternative search engine -- a $24 million venture-backed project that's been three years in the making -- is today launching its public beta. With the official rollout, Blekko is also releasing several new features designed for both mainstream and the site's super users... read more

by Jennifer Van Grove

One Reason To Take New Search Engine Blekko Serious

Starting a new search engine is a rough business. Even the most promising attempts to challenge Google (and now Bing) always end up as punchlines: think Cuil or Wolfram Alpha. Still, we think Blekko, which just launched publicly this morning, is worth paying attention to... read more

by Nick Saint

New Search Engine, Blekko, Uses Users to Filter Results

Blekko, a new search engine that attempts to use human input to refine search results, launched a public beta on Monday. The Blekko.com site uses what the site calls "slashtags": a curated list of sites around a given topic. Users can create the sites, and also use them as a search modifier to only search within them... read more

by Mark Hachman

'Blekko' Search Site Takes On Google, Bing

The website Blekko.com launches Monday and is taking on search giant Google. Blekko's CEO says the Web has been overrun by junk sites that use key words to get high search rankings from Google. The new site emphasizes "useful" information with results tweaked by human editors. But Blekko is keeping its goals realistic... read more

New Search Engine blekko Launches Beta

After two and half years of work and raising nearly $20 million, the new search engine Blekko is available today in private beta. While Blekko boasts to be a complete web search engine, with crawls of billions of web pages, the new start-up knows they ... read more

by Melanie Saxe

Blekko: New Search Engine Lets You "Spin" The Web

Did you think the search engine wars had devolved into a fight between only Google and Bing? Think again. New challenger Blekko is stepping into the fray, opening to limited beta testing today. It offers a compelling way to “slash the web” and put a particular spin on your search results ... read more

July 28, 2010 by Danny Sullivan

Google, Content Farms & Why This May Be Blekko’s Moment

At the beginning of Google’s "Searchology" event in early 2007 original Google employee Craig Silverstein opined, “If Google had started a year or two earlier, it wouldn’t have worked.” That’s because prior to that time (1998) the internet ... read more

July 26, 2010 by Greg Sterling

TechCrunch Review: The Blekko Search Engine Prepares
To Launch

It takes a crazier than average entrepreneur to go after the search market. There’s an entrenched player, Google, with 65% market share. Google is so powerful the second player, Yahoo, just bailed out of the market. And third place Microsoft is throwing ... read more

July 19, 2010 by Michael Arrington

Blekko Screencast And Founder Interview

We just posted our first thoughts on Blekko, a new search engine preparing to launch to the public. We’ve also taken a screencast of the search experience on the site and have a short video interview with cofounders Rich Skrentaand Mike Markson ... read more

July 19, 2010 by Michael Arrington

Blekko Cozy Up to Webmasters, Offers Killer SEO Data Free

Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have confirmed that they will start testing the Bing algorithm live on some Yahoo! traffic this month. One of the big questions from the SEO perspective is what happens to Yahoo! Site Explorer? If it goes away then web masters ... read more

July 20, 2010 by Aaron Wall

Stealth Search Engine Blekko Raises Another $2.5 Million

Stealth search engine Blekko, which we’ve been tracking since early 2008, has closed another $2.5 million in funding, bringing the total raised to $20 million. This most recent round, says CEO Rich Skrenta, was a inside round led from existing investors USVP and CMEA Ventures ... read more

November 4, 2009 by Michael Arrington

Stealth Search Engine Blekko Raises $11.5 Million

One search engine dies, another takes a step forward. This is a hard space to find a niche in, but the money at stake if you succeed is staggering. Blekko, the stealth search engine we’ve been covering since early 2008, has raised a third round of financing – $11.5 million from ... read more

July 27, 2009 by Michael Arrington

Shhh. Blekko Is Still In The Oven. Do Not Disturb

One search engine dies, another takes a step forward. This is a hard space to find a niche in, but the money at stake if you succeed is staggering. Blekko, the stealth search engine we’ve been covering since early 2008, has raised a third round of financing – $11.5 million from ... read more

May 30, 2009 by Michael Arrington

Bing vs. Blekko: A Difference in Attitude

A couple of weeks ago I saw Blekko, the as yet unlaunced search startup from Rich Skrenta (formerly of Topix and other significant places). Yesterday TechCrunch made an early positive assessment of the site after taking a look ... read more

May 30, 2009 by Greg Sterling

Stealth Search Engine Blekko Gets Money From Marc Andreessen, SoftTech

2008 is the year of the search engine startup. Hot on the heels of Powerset’s partial launch earlier this week, stealth search engine Blekko (no logo, no website, just this and, apparently, some technology) raised a second round of financing ... read more

May 14, 2008 by Michael Arrington