Blekko
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet search engine |
| Founded | 2007 |
| Founder | Rich Skrenta |
| Defunct | March 27, 2015 |
| Fate | Acquired by IBM and discontinued |
| Headquarters | United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Rich Skrenta (founder) |
| Products | Web search engine, search toolbar |
| Parent | IBM (from March 2015) |
Blekko (stylized as blekko) was a search engine for the web that launched to the public on November 1, 2010. Its goal was to improve upon Google’s search results by indexing around 3 billion trusted websites and filtering out low-quality content farms. The platform introduced slashtags to help users narrow down popular searches and also provided a downloadable search toolbar. IBM acquired Blekko in March 2015, after which the service was discontinued.
Development
Founded in 2007 by Rich Skrenta, known for creating Newhoo (which evolved into the Open Directory Project), Blekko secured $24 million in venture funding from notable backers such as Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, U.S. Venture Partners, and CMEA Capital. The company’s approach centered on eliminating irrelevant links commonly seen in Google’s results by employing editors to pre-filter listings across categories like automobiles, finance, healthcare, and lodging. These editors enforced a "Wikipedia-style moderation" process aimed at removing content farm pages and prioritizing authoritative sources.
Slashtags functioned to restrict search outputs to specific criteria and were automatically applied to pre-moderated categories. For personal health-related queries, searches were confined to editor-approved trusted domains, often excluding top-ranking Google sites. At launch, a community of 8,000 beta editors had developed 3,000 slashtags tailored for frequent queries, with ambitions to curate the top 50 websites for the most common 100,000 searches. Additional features allowed users to view website IP addresses and flag spam content.
Blekko distinguished itself by offering enhanced data insights; appending /seo to a domain name revealed comprehensive URL analytics. This feature aligned with Big Data trends by consolidating various datasets into practical information.
The company planned to generate revenue through advertising linked to slashtags and search results. It also pledged transparency by openly sharing its ranking algorithm details, including inbound link data.
Blekko’s "Web search bill of rights" outlined principles such as open access to search data, human editorial involvement, transparency of ranking metrics, availability of web information, customizable search options, accessible advanced tools, community participation, exclusion of spam, and protection of user privacy—positioning itself as an alternative competitor to Google.
In 2011, Blekko took measures against spam by blocking content farm websites like Demand Media’s eHow. In May 2012, it collaborated with Mozilla on an "instant search" Firefox plugin that cached common queries for faster results. However, by August 2012, Blekko restricted access to its SEO statistics behind a paywall despite earlier promises of openness.
Acquisition and closure
IBM purchased Blekko in March 2015 and discontinued the search engine on March 27 of that year. The acquired technology and team were integrated into IBM Watson to improve web crawling processes, categorization accuracy, and intelligent filtering functionalities.
Slashtags
Blekko introduced slashtags—text tags preceded by a "/" character—as a method to streamline and organize search queries. While system-defined and preset slashtags were available immediately, registered users could create personalized slashtags for customized searches that minimized spam interference.
Features
The platform provided all users with access to:
- Search engine optimization metrics (fee-based starting in 2012)
- Statistics on inbound and outbound linking pages
- IP address identification tools
- Viewing of cached versions of pages
- Page tagging capabilities
- Detection of duplicate content across sites
- Tools for site comparison
- Data on crawl activity
- Total page counts
- Location information for robots.txt files
- Identification of cohosted websites
- Measurement of page load latency
- Analysis of page length
Toolbar
Blekko provided a downloadable browser toolbar that modified users' web browser default search engine and home page settings.
Reception
In 2010, John Dvorak commended Blekko as "the best out-of-the-chute new engine I've seen in the last 10 years," emphasizing its distinctive multi-dimensional approach. On the other hand, Matthew Rogers described it as "slow and cumbersome," raising doubts about the practicality of slashtags. Jeffrey L. Wilson noted some favorable search outcomes but felt that the social features negatively impacted the overall user experience.