Slangwho, Inc. was founded by John S. Shriber, Roman Zaks, and Sasha A. Tcherevkoff on September 1, 2009. Slangwho.com launched live to a private group of beta testers on March 1, 2010.

In 2009, Slangwho leased the former Tribeca studio loft of photographer Richard Avedon as office space, and launched a series of videos on Vimeo.com called "Black Box Series" directed by Italian filmmaker Aaron Chiesa. "The videos were a commentary on the 'black box' algorithms used by most search engines to determine search results. Slangwho's search results are determined by users." This new social search engine has grabbed the attention of big search engines Google and IAC (owners of Ask.com), because some technologists say that Google is broken, and people-powered search like Slangwho is the best fix.