The search engine Blekko is not content to be the underdog. It wants to be your guard dog too.
The start-up continues to embrace its motto as “the spam-free search engine.” Since it began in November 2010, Blekko has tried to position itself as the safest of the three algorithmic search engines on the market, the others being giants — Microsoft’s Bing service and that little company called Google.
When Google reconfigured its search algorithm to weed out low-quality sites and content farms last year, Blekko took the mission one step further and adopted the herculean task of banning from its results 1.1 million Web sites that it deemed untrustworthy.
And last May, after Yahoo reversed course and said that it would no longer anonymize search results and would instead join Bing and Google in keeping users’ search logs for 18 months, Blekko took the opposite approach and announced it would start deleting users’ search logs within 48 hours.
Now, Blekko plans to take its motto one step further. On Friday, it will announce a partnership with Lavasoft, which makes security software that detects spyware and adware on users’ PCs.
Under the terms of the deal, Blekko will become the default search engine for Lavasoft users and will use Lavasoft’s software to signal whether a site in its search results is trustworthy or not, using a red or green symbol.
The goal, said Rich Skrenta, chief executive of Blekko, “is to protect search especially in problematic categories like ‘cash back credit cards’ and ‘free credit reports’ where consumers can end up getting their identities stolen.”
Blekko’s pitch seems to be gaining traction. Last month, it claims 3.5 million unique visitors used the site for 100 million search queries. This time last year, 750,000 unique visitors used the service to conduct half as many queries. (People perform billions of searches each day on Google.)
“In the past, privacy was the domain of tin-foil hat people,” said Mr. Skrenta. “It’s risen to the mainstream level where amateur consumers find it a more appealing hook.”
Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/blekko-partners-with-lavasoft-on-spam-free-search/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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