by
Blekko’s alternative, human-curated search engine now averages 1 million queries a day and between 10 to 15 queries per second just three months after launch, according to January figures the startup released Monday.
Blekko’s secret sauce is its slashtags — topic tags auto-fired or appended by users to queries to limit search results to those from curated sets of websites. Blekko is reporting that there are now more than 110,000 human-curated slashtags.
Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta sees the figure as proof that the slashtag approach is resonating with users. “We’re happy at how quickly users have adopted the idea of a new search engine and have created so many quality slashtags just three months since launch,” he says.
With 66.6% market share in the U.S., search is Google’s domain to lose. Blekko’s plan of attack has been crafting a narrative that paints the upstart as renegade, most recently by eliminating all results from 20 content farm sites it labelled as spam.
In previous conversations, both Skrenta and Blekko founder Mike Markson appeared grounded in the reality that Blekko would not be making a dent in Google’s search share anytime soon. Still, at launch, the pair shared that Blekko’s model is such that it could be a profitable company at 1 million to 2 million queries per day. Having hit the smaller end of the spectrum, the question is whether the startup will begin to employ ads on the currently pristine site to start generating revenue.
No comments:
Post a Comment