For those stuck in northbound traffic on the slow moving river of traffic that is Highway 101, a quite large billboard that told me that Blinkx is the world’s largest video search engine.” In mid-May 2008, a rumor swirled across the Internet that News Corp. was kicking Blinkx’s tires. Was an acquisition in the wind? Was this billboard part of an acquisition campaign? Was it a reminder to Silicon Valley that Google’s span of control did not include video search?
I was sensitive to digitized video for two reasons. The Auto Channel told me that it has thousands of hours of automotive-related video. One interesting aspect of this is that when a video gets “hot”, it gets a great deal of traffic. What’s mystifying, if I understood what The Auto Channel told me, is that it’s very hard to predict what will strike the user’s fancy.
The other reason is that I spoke with a programmer who once did a bit of work for a couple of the large European video services. I can’t reveal the name of the project this person worked on, but it rhymes with “goosed”. The point was that video is flooding the Internet, and it is difficult to generate enough revenue to keep up with the research, development, programming, and bandwidth charges. Video on a metered line is important to many users, but, if I understood his comments, those users don’t pay. Advertisers want “tight” demographics, and the usage data aren’t compelling enough to allow some video sites to generate enough cash to stay alive at this time.
I am not sure how much video Blinkx has indexed. I heard from one of my sources that Google receives more than 1.2 million video uploads per month. I recall reading that the GOOG accounts for more than 60 percent of video search traffic, but since the ComScore traffic flap, it’s tough to know just how much traffic Google has. Could be 70 percent, maybe more. A few days ago, ComScore said Google was the number one Web site on earth. Maybe? Maybe not? Google knows because it does not have to estimate its traffic. My sources tell me that Google just counts traffic, no sampling necessary, to skew the data.
The Blinkx tag line is “Over 26 million hours of video. Search it all.” Their system appears to have a slather of patent documents in place. I tallied more than 100 when I stopped counting. Its conceptual search that includes speech recognition, neural networks, and machine learning to create text transcripts. That text is then searched.
I looked at the BBN Technologies system (né Podzinger and now EveryZing) a year or so ago and found it interesting. The technologies required to take audio or the audio data from a video are of intense interest to those in law enforcement, military intelligence, and government contractors working in related fields. For the average user like me, I found a large number of false drops. My test queries with other audio and video search systems is about the same as my BBN trial. The technology is coming along, but the number of false drops suppressed my appetite for these systems. Alas, the indexing of podcasts was not available to me when I visited the site on May 15 and May 16.
The good news is that Pluggd is alive and seems reasonably well. You can find, watch, listen, collect, and share audio and video content on this service. I did a search for This Week in Tech (TWIT), hosted by Leo LaPorte. Alas, even though the show is featured on Pluggd’s splash page, no TWIT that I could find. The service was easy to use, and the designers were thinking of a couch potato, not a mouse potato, which is a good decision.
Overall, Blinkx has whizzy technology. Wisely Blinkx processes more than 350 US and non-US content sources into categories. Google video does the same thing. Yesterday a 20-something demonstrated CollegeHumor.com to me, and I found that it worked reasonably well if you are looking for frat guys jumping naked into swimming pools.
Just as a test, I searched for videos of one of my favorite bands, Evanescence, figuring it was unique enough a name to get a decent percentage of accurate search results: Blinkx, 31,000, Google, 68, YouTube 116,000, and Yahoo! (http://video.yahoo.com) 239. This does not take into account, however, functions that remove duplicate content, another sticking point when simply counting videos. You need to run your own test. Mine suggests the Google’s Video and YouTube properties are slightly larger than other video index entries at this moment for this specific query.
As I clicked through the delightful music of Evanscence, I realized that each of these services index one another. Some remove duplicates and copyrighted content. Other services may not be mindful of duplicates and copyright. Again: you will need to run your own tests.
One odd datum popped up during my tests. Blinkx appears to use Google Analytics to count page hits and record user behavior. Blinkx uses Autonomy’s high-profile search technology. The founder of Blinkx guru is Suranga Chandratillake, and his company has claimed “the largest” trophy.
Video search is changing fast. Blink once. The video search leader board may change.
Jessica Bratcher, May 16, 2008