Michael Gugel

Blekko

Posted on Nov 13, 2010 by Michael Gugel in Interviews

I met Rich Skrenta, the CEO of Blekko at Pubcon 2010.

Me and Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko

Blekko isn’t trying to be a Google killer. They’re NOT trying to make an easy way to search. Instead, they’re going after a small segment of advanced users. In an industry where 1% market share is worth a billion dollars, that seems like a pretty smart strategy.

And I wouldn’t bet against Rich being a success. He’s got a great track record.

• Rich created DMOZ.  At first, DMOZ was extremely useful and popular. But over time, the internet grew so huge that DMOZ’s organizational structure stopped being relevant. Search engines also came on the scene and DMOZ suffered from widespread corruption.
• Rich moved on to create Topix in 2003. Topix was like the first Yahoo Answers. It let people post a question (instead of trying to figure out keywords to type into Google) and receive answers from folks around the internet. Topix generates a huge huge amount of user-generated content, ranks great in Google, and continues to get a ton of traffic.
• Blekko is just a natural evolution of Rich’s desire to “organize the internet”.

Quick Facts:

1. Rich said that Blekko received $24MM in venture capital funding.
2. Monetization will be based an Adwords-type system.  They won’t be releasing any premium SEO tools or services.
3. From sources more knowledgeable about tech stuff than myself, it’s estimated that Blekko needs close to 800 servers (at $5000 a pop) to effectively crawl the web.  That’s a $4MM upfront hardware cost.
4. CPMs for a search engine are around $50-$100.