subject: Blekko ‘Slashtags' its way through! [print this page] Blekko Slashtags' its way through! Blekko Slashtags' its way through!
So far it has been a war between Google, Yahoo and Bing. But it's time to let Blekko make its presence felt as this new and much anticipated search engine is finally ready for public use.
Founded by CEO Rick Skrenta after three years of strenuous development, Blekko search engine uses a method called slash tag technology to make web search easier and less complicated. Simply put, slash tags are curated groups of websites organized around topic like money, healthcare, auto and even something specific like low-carb.
The technology of slash tags is added to search queries which help limit findings only to specific sets of websites. With its launch the search engine is automatically applying slash tags to improve results in seven initial categories namely health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels.
Rich Skrenta believes that as the number of URLs on the web increases every day, "it will take a layer of human oversight to separate the trusted content from the spam".
Blekko has been available on a very limited basis on a private beta since June 2010 during which it has more than 8,000 join. During this period, users collectively created more than 3,000 slash tags.
"Today is the first day first step in a process of building a volunteer army at Blekko that will eventually slash spam from search and deliver the most relevant results," added Rich Skrenta.
The company has raised $ 20 million dollar from a variety of investors, including Marc Andreessen and Jeff Clavier's SoftTech VC.
