TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary
Bold tech & web commentary
Subscribe to RSS FeedTechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.
BlinkX, Video Search, and the Corporate Shell Game
The Financial Times broke the news, but Mashable summed it up more succinctly: $20 and a free pony if you can figure this one out.
The demerger of the consumer business is a complex transaction, in which Autonomy will first take ownership of Blinkx, a separate company founded by Autonomy’s former US chief technology officer, Suranga Chandratillake, which already uses Autonomy’s consumer search technology. In exchange Blinkx will be given exclusive rights to the technology, everywhere outside China. Then the Blinkx business will be demerged again and floated. [From the FT article]
Sounds like an complicated way for Suranga Chandratillake to take a pay day while keeping shareholders happy. Or something.
Meanwhile, try using Blinkx. Personally, I found the search results from YouTube alone a lot better: less clutter in the results, more relevance.
BlinkX for “Nissan Skyline.”
YouTube for “Nissan Skyline.”
BlinkX results are full of a bunch of remote-controlled car stuff - not what I was looking for. Plus, the BlinkX interface, with preview videos playing unsolicited, video thumbnails, and so on, is distracting to the point of making the site painful to use - however technically impressive it may be. Say what you will about the aesthetics/usability of YouTube, but its better than BlinkX.
Finally, BlinkX doesn’t seem to be indexing YouTube properly either. The result sets from each don’t match, and I have no idea how BlinkX ranks video results from one site over another anyway. When it comes right down to it, BlinkX seems counter-intuitive, dis-organized, and a confusing way to find video. This is the fate I fear for CastTV.
blinkx, casttv, mashable, mergers, video youtubeIf you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Related Posts
CastTV - is there room between verticals and gootube?
A Question for Jason C.: How would Netscape have handled “the Number”?
KnowledgeTree - Open Source Document Management for the Enterprise
Why I Don’t Like Video - My Brain is a Mini-Google, Yours is Too
Review Index
2 Responses to “BlinkX, Video Search, and the Corporate Shell Game”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe to TechFold RSSRecent Posts
- Google Blogsearch: the Techmeme sapper
- Stubhub Revisted
- Yahoo and Bain: What’s Really Going On
- IE7 Hanldes Flash Way Better than Firefox3
- Microsoft is Hamstringing themselves
- Does anyone else think Google is over-extending itself?
- Going Travelling? Try VentureFar.net
- If you could go anywhere in the world and meet with any geek, executive, or company, who would it be?
- Is Apple Paying for Product Placement in Paperbacks?
- Scoble and Twitter in the Borneo Bulletin: the future of news?
Recent Comments
- Mike on How to Make Cluztr the Next Big Thing in Four Easy Steps
- RajSri on Does anyone else think Google is over-extending itself?
- Stubhub Revisted « TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary on The StubHub Scam
- Leibowit » Excited for Tickets? Too Bad on The StubHub Scam
- Bartek on Facebook Gets It, Becoming the Web OS: Microsoft 2.0
Post Archives
- October 2008 (1)
- September 2008 (6)
- July 2008 (2)
- May 2008 (5)
- April 2008 (9)
- February 2008 (5)
- January 2008 (26)
- December 2007 (28)
- November 2007 (16)
- October 2007 (7)
- September 2007 (17)
- August 2007 (15)
- July 2007 (19)
- June 2007 (67)
- May 2007 (62)
- April 2007 (66)
- March 2007 (1)
Categories
Links
I can’t agree with your statement on search quality giving one single query, besides for somone else like me the remote control results are better.
Blinkx does not take YouTube content, it aims to be legal.
I usually like your posts, this one really strike me on such unfounded opinions.
Fernando, BlinkX doesn’t take YouTube content - but it does index it. My point is that given that YouTube indexes its own content better than BlinkX does, and that a great deal of the web’s video content is on YouTube, where does that leave BlinkX, and similar “aggregate search engines?”
Anyway, yes, my opinions are often unfounded - such is the joy of blogging, as is being called out for them! Yes, I am pretty down on BlinkX (and CastTV), but in my opinion, for what its worth, YouTube/Google does video search better, and the BlinkX site is hard to look at. I just tell it like I see it.
Have you used BlinkX a lot, or is it your main video search enginge? Feel free to post your experiences and change my mind!