There’s little doubt that Blekko has made a splash in the market. Its hard-line policy on spam, which recently included the rejection of 20 major sites the engine deemed to be “content farms,” has earned it plenty of attention – especially with the outcry against the heavy spam results in Google. Blekko saw a surge of traffic during all the media buzz on Google’s spam issues, but its growth hasn’t slowed down since. But how big is Blekko, exactly?
Figures shown recently state that the site has achieved 30 million search queries in total, but the numbers aren’t exactly concrete. After all, the statistic of “a million searches per day” for its first week were announced all the way back in November, and an average of a million per day was reiterated in February. So why is Blekko only announcing 30 million, when 60 to 90 million would be more appropriate?
The answer may be found in what’s termed a “query.” If an individual comes to a page and attempts three or four different searches before going off-site, is that person conducting a single query or several? Or do we go to the extreme of counting each unique visitor only once? And which locations are we tabulating? It’s this same variability of terminology that has created figures of anywhere from 400 million to 3 billion searches per day on Google. Regardless, Blekko hasn’t given the parameters – merely the claim that 30 million searches have been conducted, and that they’ve originated from somewhere around 200 thousand different visitors.
The slashtag search engine assures us, however, that the company is growing steadily and seeing more visitors and searches as time goes on. While it may be difficult to see exactly where they rank or exactly how fast the growth is, there’s no doubt that they’re gaining a foothold with impressive speed.
Jen Williams
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