Stealth search engine Blekko, which we’ve been tracking since early 2008, has closed another $2.5 million in funding, bringing the total raised to $20 million. This most recent round, says CEO Rich Skrenta, was a inside round led from existing investors USVP and CMEA Ventures.
Blekko is taking their own sweet time to launch, so don’t expect much more from them until they are good and ready. In the meantime, they’re hiring like crazy.
I hope they will bring something really good.
I’m sick of being tracked by Google (products) all over the Web.
Do people care enough about Google tracking them that they’ll actively switch to another – ANY other – search engine? Rule #1 for entrepreneurship, IMO, is find a need and fill it. What’s the search industry’s need?
Not that it’s perfect, but Google does exactly what a search engine should do. Why are so many tech firms flocking to add products to an industry with a dominant player that has very few complaints, practically none of which exist outside actual industry circles?
Obviously if nobody knows for sure what the next steps are for search it is very hard to see the need for it. Once it is here it will be a “how did we live without it”.
All these startups are looking to find the next must have search product because if they nail it, big $$ follows.
True, but almost everything you ever see out of these startup search engines is incremental changes – tweaked search algorithm, new UI, better integration of multimedia results – and none of these are remotely close to the “gotta have-it” level that it will require to pull the “just-make-search-work” crowd that makes up the vast majority of search engine users.
I’m starting to think that these small changes are designed to make startup search engines attractive to Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft as acquisition targets. That I could understand.
Dan, you’ve nailed it on the head. The vast majority of new search engines either offer nothing new (cuil) or something that actually makes search slower (searchme).
Having said that, take a look at Bevyfind.com, which is offering something radically new which will make search a lot faster.
Disclaimer: I’m the BF CEO. But I still think what I wrote is true. If you disagree, I’d love to hear why.
Offtopic:
Maybe because of this: “The website at bevyfind.com contains elements from the site rapidsharecrawler.com, which appears to host malware – software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer.”
This is a reply to David Mulder (7:29pm)
David, would you mind telling me where you saw that? There is absolutely zero malware or anything similar on Bevyfind.com. Unlike other engines, we don’t even track users using cookies etc. (The only cookies we use are the ones that let the user customize his/her search page.)
Googles SafeBrowsing tool gives us a perfect clean bill of health.
So please let me know where your quote is from. That is, if you didn’t make it up, which would be very disappointing…
Actually, I had a security issue too – browsing there via Chrome preempts the page entirely declaring “Malware Detected!” Clicking the link provided by Google for an explanation takes me to a Safe Browsing diagnostic for rapidsharecrawler.com
I’d link it, but it’s within the browser rather than an external ‘warning’ URL.
Dan, thanks. I’ll check it out. The only thing I can think of is that being a search engine, someone did a search where one of the results linked to a malware site. We’re checking it out.
Apologies to David Mulder for insinuating he may have made up the problem. And thanks for making us aware of the problem
Send me a tweet when you’ve gotten it fixed – I’d like to check out the site.
David & Dan,
When we started out, we outsourced our server administration. It seems one of the server admins had a side job, and added several lines of code which point to rapidsharecrawler to one of the javascript files.
Now we’re going over all the files with a fine-toothed comb and are going over all our security settings & protocols.
Quite embarrassing, quite infuriating, and quite a lesson. I owe you both a big thank you.
Alright. Bevyfind is squeaky clean. Thanks again.
It’s called cash. The monetization potentials for search are much higher than anything else on the web.
According to the economist, each 1% of global search market is projected to be worth a billion dollars a year. Is that reason enough?
but only because one company has enriched the monetization with network effects so much. were 100 companies each holding 1% of the market, the sum would be much less
For what it’s worth, I don’t care much for google search results. There’s lots of links but the relevancy is not there. I get better results from Yahoo.
I think there is a great opportunity for an engine that can find a way to delivery better results. I don’t need a million links… just a dozen good ones.
I’ve got an open mind and these guys may have an out of the box solution that no one has thought about yet – it’s happen before. Let’s look forward to something new.
man this must be really really really good if they are in their series C funding with no product released.
my thoughts exactly…then again CUIL raised a boatload as well
probably not a good idea to use their competitor’s website for the “directions” link on their teaser page. just saying…
props to these guys for using perl in a major new project! (according to their hiring page)
BUT….i suspect its hopeless. seems like they have some novel stuff on the backend, but so what? unless they bring something truly novel to market (that google can’t replicate quickly), then there seems little hope.
its worth noting that bing’s big splash was inlined porn videos. not all “features” are tech-based.
anyway, maybe skrenta and co are just happy to have 20 mil to hack on code they want to hack on. getting three years to do that would be cool, who the hell cares if anything comes of it
It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out but as others have said a new search engine isn’t really needed. It would be cool to see them bring something entirely new and useful to the table, though.