[ChuckMcM]

People would add sites for a particular topic (aka slashtag) to their list. That would build a virtual custom search engine within the search engine. And topic specific searches thrown at it would consistently out perform Bing and Google in terms of search quality. The meta "spam" slash tag (everyone got their own) would let you tell the engine sites you never wanted to see in your search results so if you were tired of your medical queries being spammed by quacks, add them to your spam list and they wouldn't be in your results.

[leoc]

FWIW, I've wanted things like that for so long. I'm sad that I never even heard of Blekko.

[arromatic]

Why did it shut down ?

[ChuckMcM]

Ultimately, lack of traffic. During Blekko's lifetime Google went from paying people less than $10M/quarter to send their search traffic to Google to over $4B/quarter to do that. If you are ad based you need traffic to serve ads to.

At some point a pay for search model might emerge that has a big enough audience to support a company but that time is not yet here.

[arromatic]

1 . Does that mean blekko was something similar to millionshort ? 2. Was blekko capable of tackling seo sites or blogspam taht we have today or it had the advantage of low spam site count from the old web ? 3. Does it have a chance of coming back like how yahoo has been recently hinting a comeback ? 4. A stupid question : How much will it cost it build a blekko today ?

[ChuckMcM]

Not sure on #1, definitely mitigated SEO sites and blogspam (on an individual basis, if you added a spammy blog to your personal spam list it stopped showing up in results). As a result on slashtag searches there was very little spam.

Would it come back? As it was? no. The folks at Bing used some of the techniques to mitigate some spam in Bing results but didn’t implement slashtags.

It would cost between $3 - $6M to go from scratch to developing a 3 billion page index with a 10 billion page crawl ‘frontier’. You can seed the crawl with Common Crawl. If you can get $10 RPM’s ($10 per thousand queries) and roughly 10M queries/day (so $10k/day recurring revenue) you can run an operationally cash flow positive business. You would want to grow it organically to a 10 billion page index on a 100 billion page crawl which would cover 90+% of the english language queries. With clever optimizations (like a news sieve to only index pages about the news that made ‘sense’) you might improve efficiencies. You would also want to focus on reference applications (people who use search to get their job done) for paid subscriber growth, and simpler commercial partnerships for managing ad lead generation on commercial search (people looking for products or services).

Also you would need to be an advertising ‘primary’ (not taking feeds from networks on a revenue share model) So, for example, working directly with Amazon to both efficiently access their internal product index and to surface it on commercial queries. Note people like Amazon do their own advertising business on their own index so you compete with that to some extent and navigating that early is essential.

Certainly doable but not something that your typical venture fund would go for. It would have a longer payback time (lower internal rate of return) than VC’s look for.