A new social network that relies far more on human input than traditional search engines such as Google has landed $24 million in funding this week.
The search engine is called Blekko, with the company's founders clearly hoping that the human touch will offer users something that they cannot get from the likes of Google or Microsoft Bing.
Blekko's founders claims that the web is too over-run with marketing spam, which means that many results that pop up in Google searches are not really giving the user the fastest access to the necessary information or data they require.
Humans versus SEO ninjas
Blekko Chief Executive Rich Skrenta hopes that narrowing down your search to groups of websites pre-approved by other users as being the best source of information (instead of the most popular) is the way forward.
Blekko has recently raised $24 million in funding, following three years of initial development of the new online search product.
Blekko will initially offer a directory of useful, spam-free websites in the categories of health, recipes, song lyrics, hotels, automobiles, colleges and personal finance.
The site will also allow users to create their own favoured personal directories of websites for particular topics.
While it is unlikely that such an upstart will pose any kind of significant threat to Google's hegemony in the search industry, Blekko may well prove to be a useful secondary search tool.
Google issued the following statement on hearing the news about Blekko's latest round of investment: "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space - it makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day everyone benefits from that."
Via Reuters
