Blekko, a Silicon Valley startup trying to build a spam-free search engine, is getting some love from Russia.
Yandex, the most popular search engine in Russia, is expressing its affinity with a $15 million investment in Blekko and a commitment to share some of its computing power and other technology with its new U.S. partner. Blekko is getting an additional $15 million from another group consisting mostly of its earlier investors - U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Capital and PivotNorth Capital
lexipixel
7:43 pm on Sep 29, 2011 (gmt 0)
Google has a $168.26 billion market cap and Yandex is willing to throw $15M into the competition. I think that buys them an 8 hour window to do something "real big".
I'd spend it on rebranding -- the name alone is kind of "blech".
Hopefully another 15M is soon to follow for a name change, I agree with lexipixel, Blekko stinks as a name brand.
Blekko has yet to index a 6 year old site I own, or send a visitor, so I can't take it seriously on several levels, yet.
moTi
10:51 pm on Sep 29, 2011 (gmt 0)
not a native english speaker, but the branding problem must be similar to the open source facebook competitor labeled "diaspora". awkward name with negative connotations. coders aren't marketing experts and such brands will have a hard time getting any traction. dunno why investors dump millions of dollars into a website and don't realize the obvious.
Alexei
11:48 pm on Sep 29, 2011 (gmt 0)
Yandex has a nice story behind the name - Volozh and Segalovich often talks about it. Plus it's a strong brand In Russia, Ukraine and now Turkey.
In Russian, it pronounces "Y A NDEX.. " as Y A HOO, not "Y E NDEX" as I heard in some videos, say [reuters.com...]
r4bet
6:08 pm on Sep 30, 2011 (gmt 0)
i like yandex but i have to tell them take back your money ! Blekko is the new cuil ...
MrFewkes
10:43 pm on Sep 30, 2011 (gmt 0)
Strange names - blekko - reminds me of Gecko - that slime ball in that stock trading movie.
