Google keeps making its search engine faster and easier -- I had to type only the letters "kidn" to get information on kidney stone treatments -- and the company notes that the billions of searches each day and its 66 percent market share prove that consumers find it useful. A long list of challengers who have fallen seem to prove that point -- Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Cuil, Kosmix, SearchMe and Wikisearch, to name only a few.
Still, Mr. Skrenta, who sold his first company to Netscape and then was a co-founder of Topix, which aggregates local news, is staking his reputation and his investors' money on a search engine called Blekko.com. Mr. Skrenta pitched his investors with the notion that there is still money to be made in search because of the high price that the two big competitors get for search terms and advertising. If Blekko could get even a small part of that revenue, the investors would reap a healthy return on their money.
His idea is to concentrate the search. Only a relatively small number of the Web's total pages are visited -- in the tens of millions rather than in the hundreds of billions. In his view, it should be possible to simplify a search engine so it could satisfy a vast majority of searchers.
Blekko uses a search algorithm like Google's or Bing's but also gets humans, mostly volunteers, to identify the sites they know, trust and visit most often and to put those at the top of the search results.
"The best site may not have the best S.E.O.," Mr. Skrenta says.
It is a Wikipedia model -- or Huffington Post model -- applied to search. Some people apparently will work for no pay if they are convinced that their efforts will help or influence others. Experts who care enough about a topic edit the results. For instance, editors trawling the health results may give a higher ranking to the Web pages written by medical experts at the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic than those generated for eHow by writers getting paid a few dollars per piece.
Using Blekko takes a little more effort. It works the way Google or Bing does, but if you want cleaner search results you must type in a slash mark and a category. The company calls them slashtags. Typing "/conservative" after "taxes," for instance, would give you sites written from the right; "/liberal" gives you the other side.
Blekko also sorts results for financial advice or sports. And it has some rather esoteric experts who have edited results for "gluten free" and "material safety data sheets," a category containing information on the properties of myriad substances. If someone tries to game the results, an expert presumably would block the efforts.
