Once a week, we are going to look at up and coming startups making a wave in the world of Innovation. This week it’s the turn of search engine Blekko – that’s right, another search engine…
So we’ve already got the juggernaut of Internet searches in Google and the dying breed, yet still pretty large Yahoo. Then there’s the new kid in town, Microsoft’s Bing, who are putting plenty of time and considerable money into their engine. Throw into the mix names like AOL and you’ll get an idea of how tough a market the Internet search engine world is.
It’s a market that is so tough, Microsoft valued Yahoo at $44 billion in 2008 and just a few years later it is deemed to be worth next to nothing. So you have to wonder why on earth would anyone want to start a new search engine, and how could they compete with the big boys? The answer, as Blekko seem to realise, is to offer something different.
Blekko’s human-curated search engine is averaging a 1 million queries a day and between 10 to 15 queries per second – and all that having only launched three months ago. So why have Blekko recorded such impressive numbers? The thing that Blekko says sets it apart from other search engines is its ‘slash tags’. For instance, if you wanted to search for Lady Gaga videos, you would search Lady Gaga/videos. Blekko say the results are much more accurate.
Rich Skrenta, Blekko’s co-founder and chief executive, says that since Google started, the Web has been taken over by unhelpful sites full of links and keywords that push them to the top of Google’s search results but are often irrelevant. Blekko only aims to show search results from sites it believes are trustworthy. As Skrenta puts it: “The goal is to clean up Web search and get all the spam out of it.” Quite a goal.
Carrying on the assault on Google, Tim Connors, founder of PivotNorth Capital and an investor in Blekko said: “Google has a hard time telling whether two articles on the same topic are written by Demand Media, which paid 50 cents for it, or whether a doctor wrote it. Humans are pretty good at that.” It’s clearly a risky business going up against Google. But highlighting the differences and doing just that is probably the only way Blekko will make a wave in this particular ocean.
Skrenta and Blekko founder Mike Markson do appear to accept that Blekko won’t be taking much of Google’s search share anytime soon. At the launch, the pair did say that Blekko’s model could be profitable at 1 million to 2 million queries per day, so the coming months will be a test of Blekko’s metal. Having raised $24 million since being founded in 2007 and having such impressive early results, you wouldn’t put it past them to make a real success of it.
What do you think – any chance of a new search engine competing against the giant of Google? Let us know your thoughts…
7/02/11
