Blinkx founder Suranga Chandratillake admits that Lycos has been “out of the glare” for quite some time, largely due to foreign ownership. But Lycos reminds the industry the portal still has 25 million daily visitors, and plans to increase those numbers through a partnership with blinkx to launch “the new Lycos broadband search experience.”
So what makes Lycos think its offering will be different or better than the others?
Well, namely, blinkx technology will give it an edge says Chandratillake. Suranga hails his video search engine as the only one that can actually listen to and watch video and understand it with speech recognition and visual analysis. Other engines use metadata-based keyword search – something Suranga calls “old fashioned.”
Plus, to build out its video index, blinkx has partnered with the big boys: Reuters; HBO; MTV; and YouTube, among 100 others over the past two years.
“That lets us get very, very deep access to content on those sites,” he told Murdok. “There really aren’t any video search engines out there. There are video-sharing sites, but none that crawl across the entire Web.”
According to Suranga, it’s the video-sharing sites that make advertisers reluctant to place their brands alongside online video. There’s no control over where the ads appear, if any Web user can upload.
Blinkx’ partnership with Lycos, he says, aims to give that control to advertisers, as content is not only from already established media, but crawled by a system that knows what the content is before hand. Blinkx’ index included TV and news clips, documentaries, music videos, and video blogs, among others.
“Lycos will have a video search box powered by blinkx,” said Suranga. We will share advertising revenue. As it gets more popular, that should generate great revenue.”
Alfred Tolle, CEO of Lycos, Inc., called creating a best-in-class video search experience “critical” in the future of the Web.
But Lycos isn’t the only of blinkx’ recent darlings. Suranga said there are other deals with major portals down the pipe, though he wouldn’t elaborate on whom.
“Nothing is signed enough for me to feel happy about [telling who else we’re working with]. We’ve got a few big ones coming up.”
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