Consider Christopher Columbus; he couldn't discover everything. Amerigo Vespucci, Francis Drake and even Daniel Boone all had to do their parts. So, it's not implausible that a smart new search engine could discover some new geography online.
"Our focus is video search, and when we say video search, we mean a single jumping point for video across the web," says Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO of Blinkx, who believes his company has found such an untapped new space. Blinkx's goal: to index the millions of videos that are online, determine the content of those videos and make them all searchable.
Video search to Blinkx is not like how we normally think of video online. The main function of YouTube -- owned by Google -- and the dozens of other video sites is simply to host content, not search it. "It's ironic, because Google usually means search," Chandratillake says. "Google is more of a Yahoo model -- a lot of hosting, and a little bit of searching here and there, but primarily a hosting service.
"The few attempts there were before we came along for worldwide video search were based entirely on metadata, so the text, the descriptions, the tags," he adds. And metadata, as Chandratillake puts it, is "at best, incomplete; at worst, directly misleading."
Instead, Blinkx uses a video's actual content to search. Blinkx first spiders the web, following every video link it can and scraping together information from where the video resides. It then processes each video at a basic level (audio, high quality, etc.) Then the video is processed by Blinkx's audio engine, which is capable of many English accents and other popular online languages. The engine picks out what is being said on a phonetic level. Blinkx also processes the video visually, looking for a library of famous faces among the digital images and breaking up the video into different scenes -- almost like a DVD chapter search -- with previews for each.
"All of this data is combined into a single record in the Blinkx index," Chandratillake says. "And this record is pretty interesting because, on the one hand, it has all this information about the video -- this person is in it, these things are said, here is metadata, etc. -- but it also knows when some of these events happen. It knows not just what words were said, but when those words were said."
Don't you wish YouTube could do that?
Despite having 26 million hours of video indexed and handling video search for dozens of major media clients, Blinkx is still running under the radar here in the U.S. So Blinkx isn't exactly competing with Google -- yet. Will Google join the video search fray? Blinkx isn't waiting to find out.