Upstart search engine Blekko has closed a $30 million funding round in its quest to be the spam-free Google.
Yandex, the most popular search engine in Russia, has invested $15 million and promised to share its servers and other technology. It’s the first time the Russian company has invested in a U.S. search engine. Blekko’s other $15 million comes from a group composed mostly of earlier investors: U.S Venture Partners, CMEA Capital and PivotNorth Capital. (Other notable investors: Ashton Kutcher, who kicked in $200,000 in January, and Marc Andreesen.)
Blekko—the name was a placeholder the company eventually decided would do just fine—offers search results only from trustworthy sites, claiming to show only the best results. This it does through the use of search filters known as “slashtags,” which rely on actual humans to curate the most useful results under frequently searched topics.
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