First off, Blekko is nothing at the moment but a page on a domain with a photo and two links, but there appears to be a little buzz about the potential, if only because they've managed to raise so much money for something that is still in, what the guys at Blekko are calling, stealth stage.

Stealth stage basically means only friends and family and the investors have seen the technology but the company was only founded in June 2007 with funding in the region of $6mn. and talk is that they've picked up another $3mn. recently, so while the website may only be a picture and a couple of links you've got to fancy that there is some pretty cool technology that some are allowed to see.

The thing is, Google is the undisputed number one when it comes to search and companies like Yahoo and Microsoft have failed to compete with them, so why do these guys think they can do it differently? There will be an element that will instantly use it just so they're not using Google, much like some use Firefox, just so they don't have to use IE, but with so much money and business generated through Google, are the advertisers really going to spend with Blekko and are the webmasters really going to display the Blekko ads, taking up retail space for something that won't generate that much cash, which no doubt will fall foul to the Google terms of service as soon as Google have seen them and amended their current terms of service. Sorry, they probably won't do that, will they!?

Anyway, a little about the new search engine. Blekko was founded by Rich Skrenta, who most will probably never have heard of, but he has a reputation. When he was 15 years old he wrote what is commonly accepted as the first ever large scale computer virus that spread outside of the computer and it was huge.

Basically Skrenta invented the boot sector virus and he transmitted his virus, the Elk Cloner, via disk, so if you used a disk with his virus in your machine it spread to your machine, but then, if you put in a disk that was clean the disk was infected because the virus would jump on it. This is how the virus spread and while it wasn't necessarily as harmful as some of the viruses doing the rounds today, it was pure genius and technically, still a virus.

Skrenta also co-founded the Open Directory Project which was later sold to Netscape. The project was and is a human edited directory and contains, literally thousands upon thousands of links to websites which are all relevant to the category that you've drilled down through. It's a nice and very useful site, but a pain in the arse to edit, so I gave up, but I still visit and for webmasters, it used to be a good place to get your site listed as it meant you got on Google far quicker and were better ranked, although I'm not so sure it's that important any more.

Anyway, Blekko will be launching this year with a shit load of cash, although not really that much when you consider the potential rewards, but at the same time, maybe not enough, although quite possibly just enough, to do enough, to get Google interested in buying the technology and making the founders and the staff, a few million dollars. The most vital thing is going to be that the technology actually does something that Google doesn't or they can't easily replicate - in essence it has to be a completely different search engine to Google and offer something worth changing for.

It will be interesting to watch and certainly an interesting one to follow, but to answer my question, will it worry Google; I don't know, but I'm already predicting that Google will be buying the technology one day, if it is any good and I suspect it will either be very soon after launch, with a very big offer, or they'll pick it up on the cheap a few years down the line, when there is no more funding and Google have done absolutely everything to slow down them getting the paying advertisers they are eventually so desperately going to need to make the business profitable.

Still, it's going to be very interesting to watch and while I've followed Google for years and love the technology, it might also be nice to have something else to use, as Microsoft and Yahoo, just don't do it for me.

Update

I'm not sure if this is for real, but I'm going to take the site on what it says until I read differently, but it looks like we now know what the web crawler for Blekko is. By all accounts it is ScoutJet.

I don't know why, but I'm looking forward to Blekko more and more.