To my knowledge the newly launched search engine Blekko is the first to have its own superhero (Blekkoman – on the left).
Buy that’s the only reason I like it.
I read this article by Damon Darlin and could not have agreed more with the basic premise of the company, which is that because search has proven to be a many billion dollar industry, any dent they can make in terms of attracting users will be worth a slice of the many billions, and with *only* $25 million in venture back, even a $100 million slice makes it a worthwhile bet. Smart business. You don’t have to win – you just have to be a little bit relevant to be in the game.
So I went out and tried Blekko on some things that I commonly search and I have to say, their results had much more relevant first page results than I ever get from bing or Google. So from my subjective perspective, they are already on to something.
I also like Blekko’s blend of humans and technology where they combine the muscle of smart algorithms with a bit of dirt-under-your-fingernails human input by having “experts” rank the relevance of content (a la the Amazon Mechanical Turk, but with free wiki-like input, as Darlin explains). I think this is some great rethinking and I bet Blekko has a very bright future at this rate (though there’s nothing to stop bing or Google from fast-following this approach).
Having said that . . . if I were a venture capitalist working with Blekko, I would give them some additional guidance. While I think the use of slashtags (described in the article) is a very good way for us to improve our search results, if I really wanted to carve out a search niche, I would really focus on some top search verticals, such as healthcare and look to not just get a raw X,000 searches per day in the land of ComScore, but have it be industry/category specific. Once you have established at least a toe-hold on a niche, that’s a lot more interesting and valuable to advertisers and that makes you a lot more interesting as an acquisition target. Follow the money and the money will start to follow you.
I did already add Blekko as a favorite site, and if I continue to get better results, I will make it my homepage. If I had to make early guesses on who should buy Blekko, I would think bing before Google, but Blekko could also license their model to specific industries, and I would think someone like WebMD would love to have better search, as one example of a less expected suitor.
-Ric
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