A few months back, we pondered the relevance and importance of budding search engine Blekko. Blekko, in case you haven’t heard, is a social media- and user-created search engine. It allows users to eliminate the gunk they don’t want to look at in their searches while empowering them to “like” and “tag” the sites they search for the most. While there is little question that Blekko is a good idea, the question remains: Will anybody show up to the party?
Thus far whether anybody shows up has been of little concern to the site as Blekko has simply progressed and continued to run smoothly. The unofficial company motto has been “we’re just doing our thing and doing it well.” Yet even the hippest tech dorks clamor for an A-list backer, and that’s exactly what Blekko got when Ashton Kutcher showed up at their door. Kutcher announced on Monday that he was investing $200,000 in Blekko. Suddenly the guy who made Twitter a household name was giving his stamp of coolness to this upstart search engine.
All this is good news for marketers and small businesses. As we speculated before, the marketing power and potential of Blekko truly is unlimited. If Blekko takes off, thanks in part to Herr Kutcher’s additional funding, small businesses trying to get on the map will finally have a shot. Is it going to single-handedly take down Google and AdWords? Hellz to the no. But what Blekko can do is create a search engine unlike any other search product out there. For example, when we used it for a client, we were able to knock out defunct sites which have similar names. What’s more, we could “like” similar sites in their industry, creating a profile for our client that supports other small businesses. Now our client can link their Twitter and Facebook pages directly to Blekko, which plays up the element of social search and its growing importance in SEO. Pretty cool”¦ and the whole endeavor for our client took less than ten minutes.
While we won’t be running to see his new film or copying some of his fashion looks, we can’t help but agree with Kutcher on this Blekko thing.
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