Blekko: New Search Engine Lets You “Spin” The Web. Did you think the search engine wars had devolved into a fight between only Google and Bing? Think again. New challenger Blekko is stepping into the fray, opening to limited beta testing today. It offers a compelling way to “slash the web” and put a particular spin on your search results. Blekko isn’t a Google-killer. Nor is Blekko positioning itself that way. But Blekko’s “slashtags” are a unique feature that may draw you in on occasions when you want to see how search results look when they’re skewed to a particular viewpoint. “We’re there for searches you can’t do elsewhere,” said Michael Markson, vice president of marketing for Blekko.
Slashtags: Spinning Your Search Results What would rank number one for “honey” if you asked bakers versus beekeepers? This is all done using slashtags, special keywords that you place after what your searching for, in order to indicate the viewpoint you want used to spin your results. /beer/christianity/green/startrek Slashtags In Action bp /liberal. Blekko, The “Slashtag” Search Engine, Goes Live. Blekko, the long anticipated search engine founded by Rich Skrenta, has finally opened to the public. The service offers an interesting way to “slash” or create specialty search engines for any topic, along with new features the company hopes will improve relevancy.
My previous article, Blekko: New Search Engine Lets You “Spin” The Web, goes into great depth about the core features you’ll find at Blekko today, so I’d encourage you to read through that. Below, I’ll provide an update on a new features added since my review of Blekko was written in July, when the service opened to a small group of testers. I’ll also revisit where Blekko sits in terms of challenging Google. Slashing Web Search Into Special Topics Slashtags, as my previous article explains, are a way that anyone can make a “vertical” search engine around any topic.
Honey /bees Allows you to find web pages about the subject of “honey” but only from web sites that someone has picked that are related to the topic of bees. Slashtag search. Evernote’s “global platform for human memory” lands $20M. Evernote, the startup dedicated to helping the world remember everything, announced today that it has raised $20 million in third round funding led by new investors Sequoia Capital.
The service — which offers desktop, mobile, and Web applications to save notes, pictures, audio, and video to a readily accessible cloud location — has been growing like gangbusters. In the past two months, it’s signed up 10,000 new users every day, and has grown to more than 4.7 million users in less than two and a half years. Revenue from its premium subscribers ($5 a month or $45 a year for more features) has risen to the point where it can fund Evernote’s day-to-day operations. In a blog post, Evernote CEO Phil Libin makes it clear that the money will go directly towards expanding the service. The funding will help the company improve the service in ways “that would have taken years to achieve organically.” Libin continues: “. Tabula raises $108M, in largest round “in a decade” for a chip company.
Updated Chip company Tabula, which has developed a semiconductor architecture that it boasts gives it a significant advantage over competitors, has just announced one of the largest rounds in a decade for a chip company. It has raised $108 million in a fourth round of funding, from venture capital firms including DAG, Benchmark, Greylock, NEA and Crosslink. The company makes programmable chips that it says can support almost any electronic device, from HDTVs, to MRI machines to Internet routers. The company says its competitors Altera and Xilinx serve a $5 billion market. But it says it can create programmable logic devices for $200, compared to a cost of more than $1,000 offered by these competitors (and as Georgi points out in the comments below, Tabula has apparently poached key people from those competitors). The company, based in the heart of Silicon Valley, where silicon-based chip companies have traditionally been based (Santa Clara, Calif.), has now raised a total of $214 million.
Appcelerator raises $2.1M to build apps on multiple devices | Ve.