blinkx - brilliant dedicated video search engine

Spun out of Autonomy, by developing a video search engine based on technology that was conceived at Cambridge University, enhanced by $150M in R&D over 12 years and protected by 111 patents, blinx was founded in 2004 by Suranga Chandratillake and operates in the UK and California.

blinkx’s video search engine has a competitive (and unique) advantage by using speech recognition to analyse and identify the component of the video content. Searching is then based on both phonetic and text transcripts to match content with search queries.

Microsoft signed up to use it on October 2006, for parts of MSN and Live.com Lycos, Infospace and parts of AOL are also licencsed users of the technology.

On June 3rd it announced it was also powering video search on Ask.com and then on June 22nd it was announced Realplayer's next version would incorporate the engine

They have also this week launched AdHoc, the first " contextually relevant video advertising platform" . As Google’s AdSense provides textually related ads on the "Text Web", blinkx’s AdHoc platform will (they say in their press release) "revolutionize video advertising by matching compelling, customized, TV-style ads to your audience on the Video Web."
http://www.blinkx.com/news?type=&id=409


They launched on AIM in May 2007 at 45p and ran up during the day by 40% to 62 pence.LSE: BLNX but than rapidly ran back down in days and closed on Friday at 43.5 p.

Their website claims ...

Today, blinkx is the world’s largest single index of rich media content on the
Web, delivering more content from a broader range of sources than either Google
or Yahoo!

In use , retrieval is fast - although type slowly for the search text box - Vagit Alekperov was truncated to Vagit Alkperov - returning the same results for this Russian Oligarch and CEO of LUKoil, but impressively with a query on the spelling.

"Glasgow Bomb" returned 59 results, "USS Liberty " = 57 and "Tesla" - 1,920

The site is a model for clarity, ease of use, uncluttered simplicity and speed - the momwentary delay in inputting text into the search box is due to the software for text concept / forecasting kicking in with each character as she is entered.

If you want the moving pictures and you want them fast this is you first port of call - those who want the more ...er..adult side of entertainment remember to switch the default search filter off. Try it now - blinx