Blekko
Search Ads tested by Blekko
According to Media Post, Startup search engine Blekko has started to test ads on it’s site. Blekko does not have a direct relationship with large brands but it’s working with them through feeds from Google and Bing.
For startups like Blekko,both Google and Bing have an inventory which enables them to use their advertisers through search feed. It’s just in the test phase and majority of the searches on Blekko will not be showing any ads and it’s highly unlikely you will see PPC ads.
Rich Skrenta,Blekko founder and CEO told “Searches are linked to slashtags that help to curate content and they are still ironing out the links”
Search Traffic is worth between $50 and $100 and he belives that when someone types keywords into a box the intent increases.Blekko is backed by Russian search engine Yandex, as well as venture capitalists PivotNorth Capital, SV Angel and Marc Andreessen.
Blekko banned 1.1 Million Sites from Its Search Engine
It seems that every search engine is having a cleanup. Recently Google has updated their algorithm by giving a boost up for some websites and a downfall for someother as per the quality of the content. Now Blekko is a going a step further by banning 1.1 million websites from its searches. They had already removed around 20 websites including eHow, Answerbag (Demand media), but the main difference between Google and Blekko in updating the algorithm is that while the former had sorted the websites based on the content by demoting the sites, Blekko removed them completely, so that it will never ever appear in Blekko.
Blekko announced on their blog that they have brought out this change with the help of ‘Adspam algorithm” and claim that this algorithm is the first of its kind to find spam rather than rank results. The algorithm is designed to identify pages which are spam and abolish before they appear in search results. They have given an explanation about “Adspam” algorithm in their blog. It says that “is a machine-learning algorithm that examines pages for a specific spam signals — the presence of multiple display ad positions on a single page and thin to zero content. Unlike algorithms used by other search engines, AdSpam is being used in conjunction with human curation to detect to continue the War on Spam.
Google, Bing and Blekko on a single platform talking about the recent ‘copying’ issue
Matt Cutts from Google, Harry Shum from Bing and Rich Skrenta of Blekko on a search panel open out their views. The debate frenzied between Harry and Matt, despite Matt being a calm natured person. Matt was very certain at Bing Copying Google’s result and clearly pointed to that whereas Harry’s response and answers were quite ambiguous. It is clear that both Google and Bing are using users data to influence rankings. The conversation then diverted to on ‘how’ both are getting their data, of course from the respective toolbar. Here again Matts puts a valid statement blaming that Bing creeped the toolbar onto users PC’s via IE where Harry had a fragile answer as that no one is bothered T&C’s so it does not value. And the discussion concluded with a note of pacifying messages.
Here is the gist of the debate/talk show/conversation
Bing uses user data on Google as a ranking signal – but that these keywords were outliers and that Bing does not just copy results.
Bing uses data from Google in their algorithm, Google denies using Bing data.
-Both Google and Bing are using user data in their algorithm
-Google have developed a chrome add on that will allow user to veto sites from their search results