Blekko, which came onto the search scene in 2008 as a startup search engine to rival Google has closed its doors. The site displays a message that says they have joined IBM and the page then redirects to an IBM blog. Blekko was attempting to offer a different approach to search with their 'slash tags' and phrase 'slash the web', by which people could search and add in a filter or operator such as /images and users could also create their own.
This then morphed into a slightly different approach which was supposed to be more user friendly for tablets and they also produced a new engine, izik which was specifically for tablet devices - this page is also attempting a redirect but sadly is failing to do so. I'll leave you to speculate on the abilities of the programming team!
It's not exactly a surprise really - the engine has been very quiet for a couple of years and there were no real announcements on their blog for a similar period of time. I'd pretty much stopped referencing them, and I think most other search commentators had also given up on them too. It's a shame, but it does illustrate just how difficult it is to break into the search engine field with a product that's designed to rival Google and Bing. The last real alternative available now is DuckDuckGo, which is an excellent option and one worth exploring if you haven't done so already.
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