Skrentablog

Friends of blekko!

We are very pleased to announce izik, our new tablet search app. We launched izik on Friday, and today is it currently the #3 free reference app in the Apple app store.

We believe that the move to the tablet from the desktop/laptop is an environmental shift in how people consume web content. We have developed a search product that addresses the following unique problems of tablet search:

• Typing is harder on tablets
• Context needs to be in the result set to accommodate shorter queries
• Swipe features & gestures
• Tablets are image driven
• Multiple browser windows aren’t a right click away (so clicking on a bad result is more punitive on a tablet)

The product we have developed, izik, is the first search experience specifically optimized for the tablet. It leverages our core technology to create a truly unique search experience for tablet users that is both functional and beautiful.

Press coverage:

Blekko Launches Izik, A Tablet-Optimized Search App (TechCrunch)

Blekko Launches New Tablet Search Engine “Izik” (Search Engine Land)

New search engine sets out to prove Google isn’t the best option for finding things on tablets (Washington Post)

izik: Take Search for a Joy Ride on Your Tablet (blekko blog)

Meet Izik: Tablet-Friendly Search From Blekko (Search Engine Watch)

Izik is a great little internet search app built for your iPad (TUAW)

A Search Engine Made for Mobile Devices (New York Times)

Izik Review (Maclife)

Download the app:

Apple app store - iPad

Google Play - Android

Mobile site:

izik.com

From Russia with love: Yandex backs US search startup Blekko with $15 million, computing power (AP)

Search Engine Blekko Raises $30 Million From Russian Search Giant Yandex And Others (TechCrunch)

Upstart Search Engine Raises $30 Million, Gets Investment From Russian Search Company Yandex (Business Insider)

Blekko Takes on Google — With Help From Russia (Mashable)

Blekko Closes $30M Funding – Yandex Strategic Investor (blekko blog)

Apparently the prize if you win really big: you get to pitch your startup to congress.

The former tech darling has begun to assume the same status of “startup grown too big for its britches” that was once hung around the neck of its nemesis Microsoft.

But we don’t need federal intervention to level the playing field with Google. Innovation and competition are far more powerful instruments to battle companies that have grown powerful and influential. Which has been more detrimental to Microsoft's business? The lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice in the 90s, or the innovative products Apple has brought to the marketplace?

The success of Google should be applauded on Capitol Hill, not derided.

Let’s let entrepreneurs, technology and good old-fashioned innovation deal with Google. Consumers will always be the winners in that scenario.

blekko got some great coverage last Sunday in the NY Times: An Engine’s Tall Order: Streamline the Search

Earlier this week we made an announcement about enhancing searcher privacy. Key highlights:

• Personal information (such as IP addresses) will be retained a maximum of 48 hours
• A new HTTPS Preferred® system, which automatically points searchers at HTTPS (secure) websites in many cases
• SuperPrivacy® and NoAds opt-out privacy settings allows users to suppress ads and reduce logging of search keywords

And finally, blekko has grown traffic every month since our launch last November. April visitors were up 30% from March, with 750,000 unique visitors coming to blekko.com doing 50 million searches.

Not bad for a 5 month old search engine. :-)

Topix. The 2 servers on the table were the whole site at this point. $60m exit 15 months later.

We were in the cheapest office space we could find with a Palo Alto zip code. It was above a trophy shop in a wood termite-infested building. But we could open the windows! (and smell fumes from the cabinet-painting shop across the street).

Palo Alto fiber was in the street in front of our office, but actually getting access to it was bureaucratically impossible. An abortive effort to put a fast microwave link on the roof of the building went nowhere but wasted a lot of time. So we pulled a T1 (router is on the wire rack above the servers) and were in business.

blekko is at four tradeshows this month, including SXSW. We wanted to do a cool booth giveaway rather than just a pen or a squishy ball. So we ran a contest and had actual artists come up with some blekko comics that could fit on a trading card. The project turned out way better than we expected.

Read more about it at the blekkoblog.

     

I've been hugely impressed with the programming community that Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have built at Stack Overflow. In a short time Stack Overflow has risen to be the dominant programmer community on the web. And it was created, in part, as a response to frustration with running into a content farm that was spamming programming queries.

Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit.
        -- Introducing Stack Overflow

(Interestingly - and unrelated - we recently banned experts-exchange.com at blekko after tallying our user's /spam votes and noting that experts-exchange was the #1 most disliked site on blekko.)

Jeff and Joel have built a vibrant community of experts, and we felt they'd be able to help us edit blekko's programming and tech slashtags. Stack Overflow members have already suggested new slashtags that we've created, and we've begun adding their members as editors to slashtags.

The full list of slashtags (so far) that Stack Overflow will be overseeing are:

/android
/bsd
/cloud
/couchdb
/css
/directx
/dotnet
/emacs
/freebsd
/fsf
/hackerspaces
/hadoop
/hpc
/ipadapps
/it
/java
/js
/lego
/linux
/mongodb
/ms
/nosql
/open-source
/opengl
/perl
/php
/python
/rails
/ruby
/so
/sql
/tech
/techblogs
/ubuntu
/unix
/utf8
/ux
/videogames
/vim
/webdesign
/windows

We decided to commemorate this milestone in a special way. Watch:

Also see Marksonland's take...

www.spamclock.com

I consider myself a glass half full kind of guy, but it's hard to remain optimistic about the future of the World Wide Web. I think it's fantastic that my kids have access in real time to almost every piece of information and knowledge in the world. But ever since we started working on Blekko, I've become exposed to the dark side of the Internet.

Scratch below the surface of all this great information, or in our case dig deep below the surface, and it is shocking what is happening to the Internet. Millions upon millions of pages of junk are being unleashed on the web, a virtual torrent of pages designed solely to generate a few pennies in ad revenue for its creator. I fear that we are approaching a tipping point, where the volume of garbage soars beyond and overwhelms the valuable of what is on the web. Look at what has happened to email: Microsoft estimates that 90 percent of the mail that passes through its hotmail servers is spam.

What happened to email was the result of very powerful economics. Spammers and con artists discovered they could reach a massive audience for pennies. And this scale of audience essentially guaranteed a very small but profitable return. Today the economic incentives for web spammers are even more lucrative than email spam and almost guarantee a continued blizzard of trash on the web.

Web spammers simply have to create pages on the web and sit back and let search engines send them money. Current search engines have abandoned any attempt to enforce even the slightest modicum of quality control. Revenue is guaranteed if a page can draw a click.

The result is a global sweatshop workforce cranking out millions of pages of web trash. I fear we are looking at the very scary future of the web in the job postings at Mechanical Turk. Researchers recently reviewed job postings there and found that 41 percent of all jobs offerer over a two month period were aimed at recruiting workers to create spam. Most of these jobs offered folks a measly dollar a page. Some paid as little as 5 cents. But all these jobs are being filled and the spam gets spewed out.

("The most infamous girl in the history of the Internet")

Consider that in 2000 there were about 7 million hosts on the internet offering essentially all the content on the web. In 2010, the number of web hosts has soared to 250 million. How many of these 200 million plus hosts offer legitimate content? A small fraction. The rest is spam.

Which brings me to my larger point. This spam on the web is creating REAL problems that are affecting much more than our ability just to find information.

The energy and other costs for crawling, storing and serving this trash is soaring. I saw a recent estimate that 15% of the world's energy consumption in 10 years could go to support Internet usage. A fair amount of that energy is being burned by the thousands upon thousands of servers at incumbent search engines. Making search greener by weeding out spam could have a significant impact on energy consumption.

The problems and challenges of spam to the entire world are going to get worse. As the online economy continues to grow at double digits compared to stalled growth for the offline economy, the incentives for spammers get even more lucrative.

That's why we've created the world's first Spam Clock. This clock is going to record in real time the amount of web spam that is being spewed out. The clock is designed to bring greater attention to this growing problem. While it is illustrative more than scientifically accurate, it is truly indicative of the soaring spam problem.

Finally, what can we do about this? Honestly, we think our search engine can be an important solution but we need your help. If we can together create a search engine that is a curated resource of the best trusted sources on the web, we can do a great deal to reduce the economic incentive for creating spam. Spam operators won't even offer that nickel on Mechanical Turk if the chances are pretty good that a human editor will never include that page in the search database.

So we'd like to invite web searchers everywhere to help us clean up the web. It can be done. If we can just organize the best sources of information for the top 1000 search verticals we will drastically improve the web experience. And we will immediately create the first ever disincentive for polluting the web.

Please join us.

Read more:

Blekko launches Spam Slock to keep pressure on Google (Danny Sullivan)

The Spam Clock is live (Marksonland)

Social Graph meet the link graph. Link graph meet the social graph. We’re sure you two will be fast friends.

One of the reasons we built blekko is that we believe that with respect to ranking, a link, well, just ain’t what she used to be. In 1998, a link to a web site WAS the first social vote of quality. Someone took the time to log into their Geocities page and type in:

  <a href="http://marksonland.com">Marksonland</a>

Now? Most links are auto/mass-generated with the sole purpose of gaming the search engines.

You know what’s not gamed? Likes. Likes are your actual friends going around the internet telling each other the sites they think are good and bad. Friends don’t spam – and friends don’t let friends like spam.

Another way to think about it is that your friends are already curating the web every time they click the Like button. Blekko is all about human curation. Bringing Likes directly to search results is yet another method by which blekko is fighting the good fight of keeping spammers out of your search results.

How it works:

1. Log onto blekko through Facebook Connect. If you are already a blekko user, there is an option to sync your existing account to FB as well.

2. When you log in, blekko automatically creates a slashtag for you called /likes. /likes will include all the sites you and your friends have “Liked.” (If you have a lot of likes, it could take a few minutes to populate your /likes)

3. Every search you do will layer in Like information about a particular site.

4. You can search only the sites you and your friends like by appending /likes to the end of any query (ex. san francisco sushi /likes)

5. You can sort any search result page by number of likes (as opposed to date or relevance) by clicking the icon next to the date button on the top right.

6. You can like any site directly from blekko by clicking the Like button on the second line of search results.

We’ve demo’d this feature to a few folks and everyone is pretty much uniformly blown away by it. We hope you are too.

This is a seriously cool integration of Facebook data with slashtags. It demos quickly and the "aha" hits fast when you see your own social data spinning results. Check it out - http://blekko.com/

More: TechCrunch: Blekko Goes Social, Now Lets You Search Sites Your Friends Have ‘Liked’ On Facebook

There's a fascinating story in the New York Times today about an online retailer who actually increased sales and profits by insulting, threatening and even cheating his customers because the more online complaints he got, the better he ranked on Google.

A woman who purchased eyeglasses on one of this online retailer’s sites was harassed and stalked for weeks because she tried to return a purchase. At one point the online retailer told her, "you put your hand in fire. Now it’s time to get burned." The woman told the New York Times, "This might sound like an exaggeration, but I feared for my life. I was actually looking over my shoulder when I left my apartment."

It turns out that the hundreds of online complaints being written about this bad actor were perversely fooling search algorithms into believing this was a quality site because it had a large number of inbound links. In fact, this retailer would intentionally begin battles with customers when he needed to drive an increase in traffic.

Unfortunately this is just a single appalling story in a huge trend we're seeing. There are a finite set of decent retailers you might want to buy stuff online from. But there is an ever-increasing number of spam sites on the web. We're at the point now where there are far more fake retailers than real ones online. The bad sites are getting ever more sophisticated in appearing to be legitimate, to both consumers as well as search engines.

Algorithmic search is sinking.

The only way to combat this and return trust and quality to search is by taking an editorial stand and having humans identify the best sites for every category. The algorithm can't find its way through the web's growing hall of mirrors anymore. And it's only going to get worse.

When we founded blekko, we decided to find a new playbook to launch and grow our search startup. We deliberately avoided playing into the old hype of being called a "Google killer". We also resolved to work with other search startups, especially ones that shared our conviction to eliminate webspam.

So I'm pleased to announce blekko's first search partnership, with fellow search startup DuckDuckGo. When DuckDuckGo users search on a term which matches one of blekko's seven auto-fired slashtag categories, DuckDuckGo users will see results from blekko. (The seven auto-fired slashtag categories are health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels.

As part of this partnership Blekko users will have access to DuckDuckGo’s "Zero-Click Info" on a site-by-site basis. Zero-Click Info helps users find the most relevant information on sites and search terms without having to click on search results.

We’re happy to work with Gabriel and the team at DuckDuckGo. And not just because we both have weird names. It’s because we can kill spam a lot faster working together than we can working against each other. :-)

Read more:

Blekko Partners Up With Search Engine DuckDuckGo (TechCrunch)

Alternative Search Startup Blekko Announces First Partnership (Mashable)

DuckDuckGo/blekko search partnership (GabrielWeinberg.com)

Blekko and DuckDuckGo Launch Search Partnership (BusinessWire)

Blekko Announce's its first Partnership (Marksonland)

It's interesting that Blekko was in development for over three years before launching. Granted, it's a search engine, but the world has changed an awful lot in those three years.

In part this is because search engine launches tend to get more attention than launches in other product categories.

On one hand, people have told us we're crazy to be even trying to take on web search because it's impossible... On the other hand they ask why it took us so long. ;)

For our previous company, Topix, we soft-launched a prototype after 9 months of development, and then followed up 3 months later with a bigger press launch. We could do that with Topix, but I don't think it would have worked with blekko.

Some of the dings we've gotten in the launch press actually seem pretty reasonable if you consider that we have a 10-day-old web search engine being compared against ... Google.

Two weeks post-launch, we have a bunch of fans, are getting sustained search traffic 24/7, have users creating slashtags, bloggers are writing how-to posts and guides to using blekko, and we are receiving tons of great feedback from our initial surge of users.

So maybe we launched the Minimum Viable Product after all.

He is totally correct. It is totally in the long-term best interest of search engines to de-index all mass-produces content and all affiliate arbitrage and ppc arbitrage. And it does mean de-indexing all DM, Epik, all domainer mass-development efforts, and sites like business.com, etc...
      -- Johnny

Of course sham ‘developers’ are quick to point out immense value of their bogus content. Really though, step outside this wee little community bubble and ask *anyone else* in the internet world about this; the prevailing theme is abject disgust over what the internet is becoming and what monetarily incentivised content is doing to the quality of information found on the web.

The entire internet is rapidly turning into a contrived-content landfill and to be sure, a movement is slowly but surely taking place to offer alternative search solutions. If G has anything resembling an Achilles heel, this is the closest thing to it.

At its core, much like direct keyword navigation, the profitability of trash content is really nothing more than a user-sophistication issue. There are still enough clueless users out there on the web- ones that cannot differentiate between a splog adfarm and a legitimately information-rich page- to keep the bounce rate just low enough and clicks just high enough to stay black… There are just enough ‘grannies getting their first computers’ to keep the game alive. The thing is, this is changing at light speed and in time, the users demanding higher quality content will no longer be limited to tech geeks and people who really ‘get’ the web. It will be everyone.

I was recently researching tax lien investing. For one particular keyword string, an Ezine article ranked very high.

Kinda like how a liar can spot another liar or a thief can spot another thief better than anyone else, I immediately recognized this as farmed, drivel content. The problem was, the information it conveyed was wholly incorrect, in spite of the narrative being written with an authoritative tone, in spite of being ranked shockingly high in serp. It was obviously written by someone who knew precisely *nothing* about the topic at hand but was getting paid to write an article, so they hit the expected research sources, formed a dirty, five minute opinion and stood themselves out there as a bonafide expert… and once they were done writing that article, they repeated that same intellectually bankrupt process with their next paid articles on Alpacas, Forex, Lawrence Kansas Home Mortgages, Medical Tourism in India or whatever else their employer paid them to write.

This is not a sustainable model for the web. G is in a crappy spot since their monetization schemes are the impetus that drive so much of this, yet it all goes against their larger philosophy about content quality… If a challenger ever arises to threaten their dominance, it will be by devising a better algo to filter out this crap and deliver cleaner information to John Q Netguy.
      -- Anon

Teaming with excitement after completing giant post about how to be a bittersweet power user of @Blekko... The best parts of the Internet make me feel all the more alive and I'm going to write some crazy shit before I leave this world like the original vision of a beautiful startup's founding dream.
      - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Today’s news generated coverage in several top-tier national business outlets, including NYT, WSJ, AP, Reuters, Huffington Post, WIRED, FT, TIME, and BBC, as well as multiple leading tech outlets, such as Mashable, PC Mag, PC World, CNET, eWeek, ZDNET, BusinessInsider and many more.

The AP piece received more than 70 reposts in multiple top-tier outlets including CBS News, CNBC, NBC Today Show, LA Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Seattle PI, to name a few.

Broadcast coverage has also been really strong with more than 85 airings nationwide mentioning Blekko’s launch.

Rich made a great appearance on Bloomberg TV.

We’ve also received coverage from NPR, as well as NBC, CBS and ABC network affiliates in the Top DMAs including New York, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles and Dallas.

Today’s news also generated quite a bit of social media buzz with over 3,200 tweets to date. The Mashable piece alone received more than 1,400 retweets.

After the Wall Street Journal broke our press embargo 5 hours early, someone on Hacker News asked why we were launching the site on a Sunday afternoon.

But if you want to be in the Monday morning press, a writer's story needs to be done and ready by Sunday. Edited and approved and fact-checked and, and if it's going to be in print, sent to the printing-press. And you had to meet with them to tell them your story before that. So the article is actually done long before you read it, and is just working its way through some process until it lands on someone's doorstep or pops up on a website.

For any kind of big press announcement, however, there isn't a single story. You want many people writing about you - for something major, like a new product announcement, as many as you can get. So you have to coordinate a bunch of different writers, and try to get all the press to show up at the same time.

You coordinate multiple stories coming out at the same time with an "embargo", which is generally a cluster-fsck, because trying to get 20 journalists to agree to all hit "publish" at the same time on a story is like herding cats. The embargoes have been broken on every large PR event I've ever been a part of. Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's just a mistake.

Nearly all business press comes out this way.

If a startup decides to not bother with all of this embargo stuff, they don't get a press pop. No Techmeme, no Digg, no Hacker News, no Reddit, no Google News, no Twitter glow. No secondary press -- reporters tend to write about what they hear a lot of other reporters writing about. You just see a random story here and there occasionally.

I did 20 press briefings last week. We had so many back-to-back interviews last Friday we hired a cab to drive us around the city all day. We couldn't have kept the schedule if we had to find parking each time.

btw, if you don't have a great PR firm, you won't have this problem. You won't have 20 meetings in one week with 8 of them on Friday.

I love the part where I get to tell the story. The more open you are, the more interesting it is. Just tell them what it's really like to be an entrepreneur trying to push out some crazy-brained idea on the market. How you raised money, got people to join, found cheap hotel rooms for the launch and got camping cots and a crock-pot of chili and whatever else you did. It's way more interesting that some dry old press release. And more fun to tell, too.

In the end we got a ton of press - nearly all of it positive.

But it doesn't just happen by itself.

Search requires not only a big software system, but also a massive set of relevance data to help the algorithms make sense of the billions of pages on the web.

Bing and Google have hundreds of contractors that use web tools to refine this relevance data - classifying porn, spam, domain parks, ecommerce sites, fake 404's, markov-spam, official sites, and so on.

As a 20-person startup, we asked ourselves how blekko could assemble this essential data. Hire contractors? Use Mechanical Turk? Elance?

But - of course! - we know a much better way.... A way you can get orders of magnitude greater participation, while at the same time being very open about the process.

Let the public in.

We realized we could make web tools that let users sign up and help make the search engine better. If we opened up the process, we could not only get orders of magnitude more people involved than we could ever hope to employ, we could also create an open, accountable process around the search engine relevance data.

Not everyone has to participate for the model to work - most people don't edit Wikipedia, yet we have a vast encyclopedia which long ago dwarfed the closed Britannica.

But a small fraction of the web audience that does get involved can help make the search experience better for everyone else.

We're starting by letting users define their own vertical search experiences, using a feature we call slashtags. Slashtags let all of the vertical engines that people define on blekko live within the same search box. They also let you do a search and quickly pivot from one vertical to another.

I was looking for 2% cash back credit card. 1% cards are pretty common, but 2% are harder to track down. [cash back credit card] is a trainwreck of a spammed results any engine. So I made a blekko /money tag with the top 100 personal finance bloggers that I got from Kiplingers. Bingo, [cash back credit card /money] and I have great results.

Being able to go into a spammy category like health, personal finance, hotels or even lyrics and search just the best sites immediately uplevels the results. Trusted sources with no spam.

And our users are making tags we would never have thought of. One of our users created a /glutenfree tag, so you can search [chicken soup /glutenfree]. Another created a slashtag for user experience design sites, so now we have a great /ux tag.

We have a vision of curated algorithmic search that brings quality back to the web at scale, and involves the public to get there.

We're just getting started though, so stay tuned.

Cool searches which show off features:

cure for headaches
pregnancy tips
big island resorts
industrial design colleges
pan fried noodles
obama /date
global warming /conservative
bioinformatics /people
blekko /links
blekko /links /date
blekko /links /date /rss
techcrunch /seo
om malik /rank
techcrunch /seo

Read more:

A New Search Engine, Where Less Is More - New York Times

Start-Up Aims at Google: Blekko.com Taps Users to Narrow Results, Avoid Spam Sites - Wall Street Journal

Blekko, The “Slashtag” Search Engine, Goes Live - Search Engine Land

With Help from You, New Search Engine Slashes Through Spam - Wired

Alternative Search Engine Blekko Launches to Eliminate Spam in Search - Mashable

Blekko launches the biased search engine - CNET

Search engine Blekko to rely on the human touch - Reuters

Google And Blekko Head-To-Head: Blekko Lives To Fight Another Day - Search Engine Land

Power to the People: A new search engine, Blekko, uses human editors to promote quality pages and block spam content from its results. - MIT Technology Review

Interview of Rich Skrenta, of Blekko + Topix + DMOZ Fame - SEO Book

One Reason To Take New Search Engine Blekko Seriously - Business Insider

Blekko: The Newest Search Engine - PC Mag

"I recommend Blekko. It's the best out-of-the-chute new engine I've seen in the last 10 years, seriously." -- John C. Dvorak

Note other key tools in addition to the macbooks - diet dr. pepper and the bottle of scotch in the middle of the table.

Companies pay thousands of dollars for an insert in the free bag you get at registration, or a banner on the wall, or to sponsor the cocktail reception.

I think most of that stuff is worthless.

For the cost of a banner on the wall at a big show you can make 500 or 1000 tee shirts.

Instead of a logo on the wall that nobody even notices, you can have hundreds of cool industry people wearing your logo a couple of times a month. All day at work! And people love getting the shirts.

When I told my team I also wanted to mail a bunch of shirts to our users they initially freaked out. Just how do you do that efficiently? Fortunately our marketing director Stephen had already solved this problem.

He is a passionate motorcyclist and commutes to work every day on his BMW R1200GS. He actually travels about 20,000 miles a year on his bike. Two years ago he started a side business selling motorcycle accessories.

So he quickly set blekko up with the same shipping solution that he had built for his company.

Within a few days we had a Dymo LabelWriter 4XL along with rolls of Dymo labels. We subscribed to Endicia for Mac. Bubble mailers came locally from RoyalMailers.com located in Emeryville, CA. Within minutes we were printing our own USPS shipping labels with integrated stamps.

We can also easily print international shipping labels as well with the PS-2976 customs form built right in. The great thing about Endicia's service is that it includes the round postmaster stamp on each label, so you can drop international shipments right into a mailbox without having to go to the post office for inspection.

This stuff is really slick... With this setup our community manager Cheralyn was able to package and mail a huge stack of tee shirts in just a couple of hours.

If this had been done by hand it would have taken a couple of days.

Here are some of the international requests we got:

Also I have only little hope that you will ship one of this gorgeous shirts to Germany. PLEASE DO!

Not sure if you ship to Canada?

I'd wear it at all the barcamps & at work (I am a webdesigner)

Of course we in Austria - Europa want to help spread your super-hero identity!!!

Don't know do you ship in Croatia, but it would be really great to wear one on my job :) i would sure be unique :)

I'd love an awesome t-shirt please please please - I'm ready to slash the web. I doubt you will send one to Germany, though, even if it would be very shrewd international marketing …

Non-US folks are blown away when they find we actually will mail a shirt to them.