development, using nearly $25 million in venture capital from some of Silicon Valley’s top investors to build a full-scale search infrastructure. Less than a month after the public launch, Blekko is attracting a million queries a day to its slashtag search system. Its algorithm searches only pre-approved sites in eight areas, including health, personal finance, cars and travel.

On the other, there is Gabriel Weinberg, a one-man band who has built DuckDuckGo into a favorite of web geeks who haunt Reddit (owned by Wired.com’s parent corporation) and Hacker News. Using the web results from Bing (via BOSS) and a custom crawler designed to find and remove spam from results, Weinberg is now handling 2 million queries a month.

DuckDuckGo leads the web in search privacy and security, and has built custom features for techies, including a random-number generator and integration with the anonymizing service TOR. Regular users are more likely to appreciate the site’s Zero-Click info — essentially summaries of web info about a search topic that save you from having to click through to learn what “syrah” is.

The two sites begin mixing their peanut butter and chocolate Tuesday. DuckDuckGo will begin using Blekko’s curated results for selected high-level search categories, while Blekko will get the benefit of DDG’s  Zero-Click information boxes. (Despite the Wired.com-created logo above, the companies are not merging, just partnering).

The companies say the partnership makes perfect sense.

“Both our companies share the same mission of eliminating spam from search, so that users get information from the best and most relevant sources on the Web,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko.

“DuckDuckGo’s focus is pointing users to the most relevant information as quickly as possible. Blekko has dramatically improved the quality of search results in seven important categories. We’re thrilled to direct our users to this set of high-quality results,” said Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo.

Both companies are huge underdogs in the general search race. That’s dominated by Google, which pulls in more than $5 billion a quarter from search ads. Google’s U.S. share of searches is somewhere around 65 to 70 percent, depending on who is counting. Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com fill out almost all of the remainder.

But the two insurgents are showing that there’s still room for innovation in search and that smaller teams can do it faster and better — without the fear of alienating huge groups of users who don’t like any change.

Neither site currently carries ads, focusing more on acquiring loyal customers. DuckDuckGo’s Weinberg is self-funding his effort with money he made from selling his last company to Classmates.com and bringing in some revenue from Amazon.com, which pays a small percentage of any purchase that starts with a link from DuckDuckGo.

“I didn’t set out with a grand plan in mind,” Weinberg told Wired.com by phone. “I was just tinkering with different datasets like Wikipedia and Delicious and was seeing more and more spam on Google. I thought I’d get as far as I could go until I hit a plateau and then find some money [for marketing and customer acquisition] but it just keeps on growing.”

<em>Photo Illustration: Ryan Singel/Wired.com</em>

Authors: Ryan Singel

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