Blekko has seen massive traffic gains since the start of the year, and the company attributes some of its growth to growing dissatisfaction with Google.

Burgeoning search engine Blekko recently revealed its current traffic numbers and expectations for April. In its blog, the company said it expects to see four times as much traffic by the end of this month compared to its numbers at the beginning of the year, and marketers should take note that Blekko is finding its stride in the search market.

While the company attributes much of its growth to Blekko’s efforts to improve its search results this year, CEO Rich Skrenta also told Search Engine Land that its success is partially due to growing dissatisfaction with Google.

Since the search leader rolled out Search, plus Your World and its new privacy policy, many consumers are expected to look elsewhere to conduct queries. Nonetheless, Google controversy may have paved the way for Blekko and some other lesser-known search engines to receive more attention.

According to figures from Experian Hitwise shared by Blekko, the search engine will see more than 500,000 unique visitors by the end of the month. On January 1, the website reportedly garnered fewer than 100,000 visitors.

Figures from comScore, retrieved by Search Engine Land, suggest even higher overall unique visitors. Precise visitor numbers aside, the trend remains the same with Blekko seeing more than 400 percent traffic gains since the beginning of 2012.

Brafton has highlighted a number of efforts by Blekko to attract more audiences. The company launched a tool called “3-Engine Monte” last year to show results from Google, Bing and Blekko after a user entered a query. The names of each engine would not appear, as users saw only the results. The feature aimed at demonstrating the value of Blekko’s human curated results in a fairly impartial atmosphere, and it likely helped the company appeal to more users.

Joe Meloni is Brafton's former Executive News and Content Writer. He studied journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written for a number of print and web-based publications.