Ever heard of Blekko? If you haven’t, don’t feel bad – it’s an upstart startup search engine with a tiny bit of traffic and a huge chunk of publicity and funding. As of today, it’s also part of Ashton Kutcher’s investment portfolio, according to a TechCrunch report by Michael Arrington this morning.
Blekko is a pretty cool idea – combine search with slashtags that help control what results they see. For example, you can search for Ashton Kutcher /tech to see Kutcher’s activities in the tech world.
In case you didn’t know, Kutcher has become a fairly influential angel investor in the tech startup scene. Plus, any investment from the actor comes with a bonus – his celebrity. Remember the much-publicized Race to a Million Twitter Followers between Ashton and CNN?
Well, Blekko may need that celebrity. A quick sample of 14,289,074 search impressions across the Chitika network yielded all of 52 hits from Blekko. Yes, the search market is incredibly valuable, and money can be made off of small slivers of it, but 0.000364% might be stretching it a bit.
While it’s not much of a search player now, time will tell if the power of Kelso will do for Blekko what it helped do for Twitter and Foursquare.