The Next Google Search Challenger: Blekko
Rich Skrenta, who created the first computer virus (Elk Cloner), co-founded the Open Directory Project, and co-founded online news site Topix, may have bitten off the biggest challenge of his career - taking on Google. In search. — Skrenta left Topix last June.
Context & Ripple Effects
Rich Skrenta's move into search did not come out of nowhere: on December 15 he published a pointed critique arguing that Google artificially promotes recent pages that lack the backlinks normally needed to rank — a diagnosis of a weakness in the incumbent's core product (his own blog made the case two weeks before this announcement). Now TechCrunch reports he has left Topix, which he co-founded, last June to build Blekko as a direct Google challenger.
The bet rests on an unusual résumé: Skrenta created the Elk Cloner virus, co-founded the Open Directory Project — the largest human-edited web directory of its era — and ran Topix. A founder whose formative project was human curation taking on a link-algorithm incumbent frames Blekko as a test of whether editorial signal can compete with scale.
First-order effects
- Google now has a well-funded, credentialed challenger attacking the quality of its rankings rather than just its market share, with Skrenta's backlink critique serving as Blekko's opening argument.
- Topix loses its co-founder and public face, while Blekko inherits the Open Directory Project community's credibility among editors and publishers.
Second-order effects
- Other second-tier search engines face pressure to differentiate on curation or freshness too, since 'another Google clone' is no longer a fundable pitch once a name like Skrenta enters.
- Publishers and SEO operators gain a potential new ranking surface to optimize for, shifting some attention away from a single-Google distribution model if Blekko gains any query volume.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, web search splits between algorithmic incumbents and curated challengers, echoing the directory-versus-index debate the Open Directory Project embodied a decade earlier.
- Sustained criticism of Google's recency bias — from insiders as much as outsiders — raises the odds that ranking-quality complaints become a recurring competitive wedge rather than a niche grievance.
The trend: Search is entering another challenger cycle in which ex-industry founders bet that human curation and ranking-quality critiques can carve share out of Google's link-graph dominance.