Yandex announced on Friday it has invested in US search engine company Blekko.com. The Russian search giant invested $15 million out of a total of $30 million attracted in the round in exchange for an approximate 10% stake in the company, Yandex reported to East-West Digital News.
Blekko was founded in 2007 in a bid to provide users with higher quality search results. The search engine – launched just last year – organically combines search algorithms with expert opinions. It uses slashtags, defined as tools used to filter search results based on a list of preferred websites. As a result, users search only high quality sites, avoiding spam and content farms, Blekko claims.
“Blekko is the first successful search startup in the last 10 years,” Yandex spokesman Ochir Mandzhikov said to EWDN. “The number of users and search queries has been growing constantly since thesite launched. We are ready to share our expertise and are open to the possibility of technological cooperation with the company.”
“This investment is also an opportunity for us to see how a search engine works on the US market,” Mandzhikov added.
Yandex was the lead investor in the deal, which also included participation from MLC Private Equity, an Australian fund, as well as existing Blekko investors U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Capital and PivotNorth Capital.
Yandex’s Chief executive officer will join Blekko’s board of directors.
Going international
Yandex’s interests have been focused primarily on the Russian market for most of its 14 year history, but recently the company has made its international ambitions known more clearly. In July, Yandex.Factory, the company’s seed funding program launched earlier this year, granted seed funding to Refine.io, a US startup offering tools to create and share mobile application prototypes. In August, Yandex acquired full ownership of The Tweeted Times, a website offering social news services.
Yandex had previously acquired minority stakes in Face.com, a Tel-Aviv based facial recognition technology startup, and Vizi Labs, another Israeli startup focused on research and development of image processing technologies.
On the global search market, Yandex’s dominance has until now been limited to Russian speaking regions. Its market shares average 25%, 29%, and 39%, respectively, on the Kazakh, Ukrainian, and Belorussian markets.
In 2010, however, Yandex launched an English-language version of its search engine, earning praise for the accuracy of its results. Last month, it announced that it had launched a Turkish version of its search engine along with a range of other services created specifically for web users in Turkey.
