Blekkos Background

Blekko has been in development for over 2 and a half years, raising over $20 million from investors in silicon valley. Still in private beta, they have provided some journalists with a preview but are expecting a full launch later this summer.

Beekko is a full search engine (just like Google) with a focus on transparency and user control.

What makes Blekko Different?

Transparency is one of the main ways Blekko differentiate themselves from traditional search engines like Google and Bing. Theyre willing to provide all the behind the scenes data that they have to determine rank and relevancy.

This means webmasters can see an unprecedented level of data about content, meta data, and inbound links to their sites.

Their second major point of difference comes in the form of user control. With the slogan "slash the web", Blekko are giving users the ability to add "slashtags" to any search which filters results through mini indexes of authoritative sites.

Users can create their own slashtags based on a group of URLs and then use this tag to refine any queries they make. For example, if you wanted to look up a certain book on amazon, you may wish to search for the book title using the /amazon slashtag.

Below is an example of how a /wineblogs slashtag might be used,

It would be a big stretch to call Blekko a "Google killer", but their level of funding and long time in development point to this being a serious play in the search market. Time will tell if it will last.