14 DAY TRIAL // While Google and Bing bicker about copied search results, the need for more 'voices' in the search world has never been more poignant. With Yahoo gone, the task falls to the number of small companies coming from behind. Blekko has only been around a few months, but it is seeing healthy growth and has announced that it got 30 million queries in January, about 1 million per day.
The site launched publicly in November and managed to reach this point in only three months. The most interesting part is that the traffic Blekko sees at this point is on par with the post launch hype.
Regularly, startups see an influx of visitors in their first few days after going live, as a result of the coverage they may get in the press or on various tech blogs.
Of course, this is only a drop in the bucket compared to any search engine out there, Google sees something in the order of tens of billions of queries each month.
But Blekko is fighting to make a name for itself and carve out a niche. It played a savvy move recently when it banned many content-farm websites from its searches in a quest to improve search results.
The move came just after Google started to see an influx of criticism over the quality of its search results, the prevalence of poor-quality sites, built with SEO in mind, being the biggest problem.
Google can't afford to completely ban huge sites such as eHow from its search results, mainly because they may actually contain useful content. Buy Blekko can take the risk and ban these sites, for the image gain.
That said, Blekko has been growing on its own quite nicely, without the need of publicity stunts. In fact, there are now over 110,000 human created slashtags which enable users to filter their results based on a variety of topics and criteria.