Blekko: Actually We Have A Million Slashtags
Embargoed news for this morning was published last week. That news was that Blekko had 30 million search queries in January and “users have created more than 110,000 slashtags since the company’s launch in November, an indication the search market is thirsty for innovation.” Blekko has recently gained attention for banning the “top 20 spam […]
Embargoed news for this morning was published last week. That news was that Blekko had 30 million search queries in January and “users have created more than 110,000 slashtags since the company’s launch in November, an indication the search market is thirsty for innovation.”
Blekko has recently gained attention for banning the “top 20 spam sites from its search results,” which include Demand Media sites like eHow and HighBeam Research’s encyclopedia.com. In the search spam issue Blekko appears to have found its marketing hook. The site now describes itself this way: “Blekko, the new search engine that is using human curation to eliminate spam from search results.”
In an email exchange over the weekend, Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta said that the 30 million searches “came from a couple hundred thousand uniques.” He added that the published 110,000 slashtag was conservative and didn’t include “/likes slashtags” generated automatically when a user signs in to Blekko via Facebook.
According to Skrenta, “Our FB connect logins shot up after we announced /likes, presumably because people wanted the /likes slashtag.” Skrenta accordingly interprets the Facebook logging in as “an active effort to create a slashtag.”
Skrenta and his team thought it best to be conservative in reporting the slashtag figure. But he told me that if Facebook-generated “/likes” are included the “slashtag count” it rises to over a million.
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