Blinkx added podcasts and video blogs to the media available to its blinkx.tv search service.
Blinkx, a provider of search technology that uses voice recognition to index media content, said its new service brings together user-uploaded content and rich media its spiders have located on the Web, making them searchable via key words.
According to blinkx founder Suranga Chandratillake, his company’s technology is better at finding audio and video content containing the word or phrase typed into the query box, because it generates an index of each word spoken. Other video search services, including Google and Yahoo
rely on the information provided by content creators, which may be too general or too scanty.
“Podcasters are passionate about recording their half hour of content, but they won’t sit down and write out what they just spoke about. It’s surprisingly badly tagged,” he said.
Chandratillake said the new channels were a response to the proliferation of audio and video blog content in the last few months.
“In our short life span, there’s been a massive explosion of user-generated video and audio content,” he said. We realized a month ago they were getting to a critical state — not just the number, but also the hours of content.” In fact, blinkx has logged between 20 and 25 times more media content.
The announcement follows a similar one in April by TVEyes. TVEyes searches broadcast TV and radio; the company said its Podscope also indexes every word within a podcast or video blog.
The company provides its service by subscription to businesses that want to keep an eye on what the media say about them. In January, it announced a deal with Yahoo to give users access to searchable broadcast content from a variety of partners.