Blekko’s Izik Search App Comes To iPhone, Android Devices

This morning, Blekko announced that its tablet search app, izik, is now available for the iPhone and Android devices. Currently there isn’t a Blekko mobile app, but the mobile Web version of the site is optimized for smartphones.

Izik for iPad became available in January. Blekko has moved closer to izik in terms of look and feel after a recent major redesign. However, there are still differences between the mobile Web version of blekko and the new izik smartphone app.

In particular, the new izik iPhone and Android apps offer a “what’s nearby” local search feature, which allows users to find nearby businesses by category. Below are example izik iPhone screens.

Blekko and izik rely on the same search technology and back end. According to Blekko’s press materials:

izik leverages blekko’s unique Dynamic Inference Graph, the most sophisticated categorization engine ever built, to deliver a dynamically created set of categories for every query. The Dynamic Inference Graph is an enormous semantic database that algorithmically maps queries into thousands of categories.  

Blekko reports that izik has had “nearly 200,000 installs [on the iPad] with 70 percent of users returning and spending an average of 12 minutes in the app each time it’s launched.”

Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta also previously told me that blekko is now doing 5 million searches daily on blekko.com and blekko-powered sites. He added that the site has 12.5 million monthly uniques.

The new izik smartphone app is currently live in the App Store and Google Play.