New Search Engine Blekko: Future Google Challenger?
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 3, 2008 | Share This
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Look out, Google: Rich Skrenta, co-founder of news site Topix and the Open Directory Project, and the inventor of the first computer virus, has announced he will be taking on the giant with his new search startup, Blekko. Skrenta wrote that he’ll be taking on Google because the web has changed and grown remarkably since Google’s founding a decade ago, and yet it still has very little significant competition:
The web is big. Really, really big. It’s literally billions and billions of pages. It’s Carl Sagan big. And it’s doubling in size every year or two.
So the idea that what you can see in positions 1-3 above the fold on Google are the sum of what the web has to say about every possible query is crazy.
And yet they have 85%+ market share, and little effective competition. At the same time there is such a fabulous business in search. It’s the highest monetization service on the web, by far. Why does this Coke have no Pepsi?
Skrenta is not revealing much about his strategy for taking down Google, but he has written that he doesn’t like PageRank. Blekko thus far consists of six people and $2 million in funding, and TechCrunch reports that there may not be a public prototype until 2009. Though it’s hard to imagine Google bested in search, it was once a little startup too, so it’s not impossible that another company could eventually claim part of its significant market share. And as Arrington at TechCrunch points out, Blekko may not need significant market share to be a success, as even 1% of the search market is said to be worth $1 billion.
Topics: Google, Search: Innovations, Search: News |
[…] catching up with my tweets, I ran into this interesting article from Search Views, dealing with a possible future competition for Google. It seems that Rich […]
Hi, Sepideh. I found your article via Twitter. It inspired me. Thanks for sharing the news.