Blekko
 |
|
Blekko home page
|
|
|
Type of site
|
Search engine |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | IBM (International Business Machines) |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank |
 2,247 (February 2015[update]) |
| Launched | November 1, 2010 |
| Current status | Defunct (March 27, 2015) |
Blekko, trademarked as blekko (lowercase), was a company that provided a web search engine with the stated goal of providing better search results than those offered by Google Search, with results gathered from a set of 3 billion trusted webpages and excluding such sites as content farms. The company's site, launched to the public on November 1, 2010, used slashtags to provide results for common searches. Blekko also offered a downloadable search bar. It was acquired by IBM in March 2015, and the service was discontinued.
The company was co-founded in 2007 by Rich Skrenta, who had created Newhoo, which was acquired by Netscape and renamed as the Open Directory Project. Skrenta "is still remembered most for unleashing the Elk Cloner virus on the world". Blekko raised $24 million in venture capital from such individuals as Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway, as well as from U.S. Venture Partners and CMEA Capital. The company's goal was to be able to provide useful search results without the extraneous links often provided by Google. Individuals who enter searches for such frequently searched categories as cars, finance, health and hotels received results prescreened by Blekko editors who used what the New York Times described as "-style policing" to weed out pages created by content farms and focus on results from professionals. Use of slashtags restricted the set of search results to those matching the specified characteristic and a slashtag was to be automatically added for search categories with prescreened results. Queries related to personal health were limited to a prescreened list of sites that Blekko editors had determined to be trustworthy, excluding many sites that rank highly in Google searches. As of Blekko's launch date, its 8,000 beta editors had developed 3,000 slashtags corresponding to the site's most frequent searches. The company hoped to use editors to develop prepared lists of the 50 sites that best match its 100,000 most frequent search targets. Additional tools allowed users to see the IP address that a website is running on and let registered users label a site as spam.
...
Wikipedia