( Mashable ) -- Blekko 's alternative search engine -- a $ 24 million venture-backed project that 's been three years in the making -- is today launching its public beta . With the official rollout , Blekko is also releasing several new features designed for both mainstream and the site 's super users . As you may recall , Blekko is designed to eliminate spam search results , allowing users to search just a subset of the web through its proprietary slashtag technology . The most significant upgrade to Blekko 's search engine is the addition of slashtags that auto-fire for queries that fall into one seven categories : health , colleges , autos , personal finance , lyrics , recipes and hotels . Every time a Blekko user 's query is determined to be in one of these categories , Blekko will automatically append the associated slashtag to the query and limit results to just the subset of URLs that fall under that slashtag . The auto-fire functionality is designed with passive searchers in mind , and aims to eliminate friction for first time users . The technology that powers these auto-slashtags was developed through an extensive research and development phase that involved analyzing the relationship between queries and the type of spam results they typically generate . Blekko plans to introduce auto-slashing for additional categories moving forward , but selected to launch with ones that represent a high volume of search traffic and are typically laden with spammy results . Health , lyric and financial queries on Google or Bing , for instance , will return results dominated by poor quality content farms or malware-hosting sites . Those same searches on Blekko yield results only from high quality sites . Blekko 's slashtag formula works because of passionate users who take the time to add and edit URLs for category slashtags . As such , the company has released new features to enable users to apply to be editors for slashtags as well as share their comments and feedback on individual slashtags . Think of this as the Wikipedia formula but applied to search , so a small percentage of users will work together to build out slashtags for the majority of Blekko searchers . Blekko has been testing its solution to search with roughly 8,000 beta testers who have created more than 3,000 different slashtags . Blekko tells us that 11 percent of its existing user base come back to the site on a weekly basis . CEO Rich Skrenta and founder Mike Markson have modest projections for the immediate future , but believe that once the site hits one to two million queries per day , it can be profitable . Blekko is currently available on the web or as a mobile-optimized site , but mobile applications are also said to be in the works . © 2013 MASHABLE.com . All rights reserved .
Blekko 's search engine is a $ 24 million venture - backed project . The engine is designed to remove spam search results . Most significant change to Google 's search engine is the addition of slashtags .