For many months now dozens of people have asked me about what’s cooking at Blekko. And for many months all I’ve been able to say is “Blekko is a big, bold, bet in search. It’s in stealth. Stay tuned.”

Well,  today I can finally give them an answer.

And here it is, in video form (thanks Mike Arrington):
Here’s what Blekko’s founders Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson had to say about it:

You can also see what Rich and Mike had to say about Blekko on their respective blogs, here and here.

Finally, here is the original TechCrunch post on Blekko (I’ve included snippets and screenshots below):

“What Makes Blekko Different?

Blekko is a full web search engine, with regular crawls of billions of web pages. But they know that they can’t beat Google at size of index, relevancy and speed right out of the gate. So they’re differentiating themselves in  another way – by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can’t do elsewhere. And by providing an unprecedented level of access to the algorithms and data that Blekko uses to determine relevancy.

That doesn’t mean Blekko’s relevancy isn’t great. The company says they’re on par with Google and Bing for most queries. But the differentiating feature are the query refinement tools they call Slashtags. These tools, like /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs, or any combination, make it very simple to quickly filter results to what you are looking for.

Users can create their own slashtags based on a group of URLs. I’ve created one that lists all TechCrunch sites to do easy site search. Others have created slashtags for conservative or liberal blogs, top tech sites, etc. If they make those slashtags public, others can use them, too.

The company also lets users search via a variety of APIs. Add /amazon to search on Amazon. Or /twitter to search via the Twitter API. Or just type /whatever.com to search just that domain.”

(more…)