Blekko, a well-funded new search engine that aims to be No. 3 behind Google and Bing, reports that it averaged about 1 million queries a day in its first week of being open to the public.

While that's hardly a Google-size number (it handles more than a billion searches a day), it's a respectable number for a new search site that launched just eight days ago.

"We are flattered and obviously pleasantly surprised at the enthusiastic response to Blekko," said CEO Rich Skrenta.

Blekko wants to help cut down on search-result spam by having human editors identify the best sites to search for given topics, such as /liberal, /glutenfree, /health and /colleges. These slashtags are suggested to users as they type queries. For queries about health and seven other topics, Blekko automatically runs the user's query against the editorially picked sites, rather than against a full index of the web.

Though that auto-narrowing was a last-minute addition to Blekko, the company said it is automatically redirecting approximately 8 percent of its searches already. Increasing that percentage will likely be key for the company so that less-tech savvy users won't have to even understand what slashtags are to benefit from them.

Users created around 30,000 of these custom site searches in the first week, which is more than three times as many as were created in the company's three-month closed test.

The key number for Blekko, however, will be the number of searchers who return to Blekko after the first week. That came in at a little over 11 percent for its test group. Blekko doesn't know yet what percent of the general public will return, but having a loyal user base will be key to the company succeeding in weaning users from Google.

According to Blekko's Twitter feed over the last week, Google and others have taken notice of the site, and their recruiters are already trying to get at the company's engineers. In response, Blekko returned the favor, Tweeting "Hey Googlers! Like working on search? Startups are more fun to work at than big co's."

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also: