Hubble Starts to Wake Up
Posted by on under rich skrenta, search experience, video interview, first thoughts, search engine | 
We just posted our first thoughts on Blekko, a new search engine preparing to launch to the public. We've also taken a screencast of the search experience on the site and have a short video interview with cofounders Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson.
Posted by on under rich skrenta, venture investors, billis, secd, cier, search market, google, cofounder, beta testers, startups, launch, milli, market share, topix, entrepreneur, ace, few days, ceo, blekko, angel |
It takes a crazier than average entrepreneur to go after the search market. There's an entrenched player, Google, with 65% market share. Google is so powerful the second player, Yahoo, just bailed out of the market. And third place Microsoft is throwing billions of dollars around just to get in the game. We've seen Wikia, Cuil and other well backed startups try and fail at search. Now Blekko is preparing to launch. Will they find success where everyone else has failed? They've been working on Blekko for 2.5 years now - we first covered them in January 2008. Cofounder and CEO Rich Skrenta had just left his previous company, Topix. Blekko has raised three rounds of financing since then, totaling $20 million, from some of the most respected angel and venture investors in Silicon Valley. Blekko remain in private alpha, although I've had the chance to test the engine over the last few days. They will shortly begin letting a few beta testers onto the site, and a full launch will happen later this summer.
Posted by on under rich skrenta, ceo, currency, peoe, demo, search engine |
Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp (which is currently being livestreamed here), Blekko founder and CEO Rich Skrenta gave the first live demo of the startup's innovative search engine (be sure to check out our initial review). To mark the occasion, Blekko is giving out an invite to 500 lucky TechCrunch readers — just be one of the first people to email a message requesting an invite to techcrunch@blekko.com.
