Goodbye Blekko: Search Engine Joins IBM’s Watson Team

▤ Summary

Blekko’s home page message gives the impression of a complete acquisition, but IBM’s post mentions the acquisition of “certain technology.” In our work to enhance the performance of cognitive computing systems, we’re constantly exploring new ways to identify, understand and make use of information from both public and private sources. We’ve reached out to Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta (who tweeted the news) for clarification on what IBM is acquiring, and we’ll update this if we learn more. Blekko came out of stealth in 2008 with Skrenta promising to create a search engine with “algorithmic editorial differentiation” compared to Google. About three weeks later, Google announced the Panda algorithm update, its own effort to combat spam in search results — by no means a response to Blekko’s announcement, but certainly indirect validation that Blekko, and others who had been complaining about the amount of spam in Google’s search index, were on to something. Blekko has remained out of the news for almost two years, though, with some of its last mentions being a search app for tablets and a joint funding round/layoffs.

▦ Linked Companies

IBM

$1B+