Blekko says its search queries climbed to a million a day in January. CEO Rich Skrenta tells WebProNews that Blekko has seen growth since its announcement that it has banned some content farms from its index.
"We did see a big surge in traffic following our announcement that we banned the top 20 content farms," he says. "We’ve had a lot of positive reaction to that from web users who are tired of seeing poor quality content in their search results."
"These new users are glad we’ve taken a stand and are checking the site out," he adds. "I don’t have stats yet on how many new slashtags they may have made yet, though."
Blekko issued a metrics release today, looking at how many slashtags have been created since launch, as well as total search queries in January – an all time high. Blekko users have created over 110,000 slashtags since the company’s November launch, and the search engine saw over 30 million search queries on the site in January with user activity for the month averaging between 10 to 15 queries per second. While Blekko saw a small dip in queries after an all time high at launch, current search levels are now greater than the initial launch pop, the company says.
"We’re happy at how quickly users have adopted the idea of a new search engine and have created so many quality slashtags just three months since launch," Skrenta said. "Our call to rid the Web of spam has been heard loud and clear by many and we encourage our community to continue to slash the spam."
Below are a couple of recent interviews we did with Skrenta on webspam and Blekko:
As Skrenta was on the panel with Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Harry Shum last week, in which those two argued about the whole Bing-copying-search-results debate, we asked Skrenta for his take on the matter, but he wouldn’t comment on that.
As DuckDuckGo has started hard wiring in wikiHow content as its top results for how-to queries, we asked if Blekko would ever consider such a move and whether Blekko had been approached by wikiHow. His response was simply, "We haven’t been approached by wikiHow."
Blekko does say that it will add to its list of 20 blocked sites as necessary.