Russian Search Engine Yandex Leads $30 Million Investment In Blekko. Blekko is the either the fourth US search engine or the third if you no longer consider Yahoo a search engine.
And the company has been able to maintain visibility and stir the pot with its persistent criticism of Google search results being spam-filled. Now Blekko has secured $30 million in new funding from a range of earlier investors and new investors. Most notable among the second group is Russian search engine Yandex. The Russian search engine is making a strategic investment in Blekko and Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh will join the blekko board.
Yandex operates in its native Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkey and has a presence in Palo Alto, where its Yandex Labs is based. I spoke earlier this week to Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta who said that Yandex will help his company in a number of ways beyond the funding, including providing some technology infrastructure support. Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Outside USA. Oh Good Grep! Web Grepper: A New Web Intelligence Feature From Blekko. Blekko, the search engine that launched last year and is known for its spam reduction efforts, is introducing a new feature today that will help make previously difficult, if not impossible to find (for free), web data accessible to more searchers, marketers, media, and others.
Say hello to Web Grepper. More about the name in a moment. What’s a Web Grepper? Web Grepper allows users to run searches on the ENTIRE Blekko index (more than 20 billion URLs according to a recent presentation) 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. It’s another tool for your web intelligence toolbox. Here are a few examples of Web Greps that Blekko has run during the testing: 1. 2. 3. 4. Given the increasing amount of data included in the coding of a web page these days the possibilities are many. How Can You Use Web Grepper. 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 billions of dollars around just to get in the game. We’ve seen Wikia, Cuil and other well backed startups try and fail at search. Now Blekko is preparing to launch. They’ve been working on Blekko for 2.5 years now – we first covered them in January 2008. Blekko remain in private alpha, although I’ve had the chance to test the engine over the last few days.
What Makes Blekko Different? Blekko is a full web search engine, with regular crawls of billions of web pages. That doesn’t mean Blekko’s relevancy isn’t great. Users can create their own slashtags based on a group of URLs. The company also lets users search via a variety of APIs. Blekko Is Instantly Likeable Will less advanced users like Blekko, too? Transparency. Blekko Screencast And Founder Interview.