Blekko

After three years of development, 8,000 private beta testers, and $20 million in, Blekko is finally ready for primetime--well, public beta primetime. The service is a search engine, which raises the inevitable question--"another search engine? Really?" What sets the site apart is its aggressive approach toward "search spam."

Blekko relies on a technology called "slashtags," refining results thusly, "search query /slashtag," a clever way of essentially searching inside categories within your search query on the fly.

Let's take a vanity search, for example (because I assume you're all searching my name anyway, right? Search "brian heater /tech" and you'll get very different search results when you search "brian heater /comics."

Techcrunch claims that Blekko's own decision not to overhype itself may be what saves the company from becoming another crushing disappointment like, say, Cuil (remember them?). For better or worse, however, the tech industry seems to be doing all the hyping the new company could ask for.

According to Blekko itself, 11.5 percent of its beta users have continued to use the site on a weekly basis. Not too shabby for a beta search engine.

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