Blekko- A Research Engine ?
I have been following the blogs of Blekko's co-founders- Rich Skrenta & Mike Markson - for quite a while. In fact, I had a comment exchange with Mike on his blog about Microsoft launching a search engine under a completely new name for branding purposes. Looks we foresaw Bing coming!
Both Rich and Mike are very keen observers of branding, positioning and search engines and they both talk about those issues here and here
Given the really tech+marketing savvy behind Blekko, what positioning could they take?
My wild eyed speculation...
It seems like any search service is so scared of being a Google killer, and the unrealistic expectations that come with it, that most firms are moving away from the search engine tag. In the quest to be anything but a search engine, it looks like every type of "engine" is taken - explore engine (Kosmix) , decision engine (Bing), real time search engine (Twitter) and computational knowledge engine (Wolfram Alpha).
But, one very important type of "engine" and a pretty solid use case of search engines is not yet taken. How about a "Research engine" for research purposes?
- I think while Google and Co, do a great job for quickly finding the one definite answer at something but they suck at more ambiguous and research oriented areas. Some features of research oriented search includes saved queries, indepth site specific searches, correlation between one or more queries, persistence of queries across time and much much more...
- You cant win by taking on Google directly but its necessary to carve a separate position in the minds of users. Rich talks about it here .
- The branding of "research engine" is simple and also has connotations of search (Re- Search - Get it? )
- Also, with TechCrunch mentioning that its not a Google killer and others talking about Blekko's "intended audience ", I presume they are not going after everything (I.e. Simple queries) and they are also not going after vertical search but going after a use case type customer segment which could be more of a advanced/heavy search user that needs to do research.
- I think each search result will look different. For example, if you are looking for "New York Restaurants", the search results page will look different from when you search for "Bill Gates"
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