Today, Blinkx debuted SmartFeed, the newest feature to their search service, which focuses more and more on the rich media aspect of search. Initially, blinkx launched with the intention of developing a strong presence in the desktop search field, which has since become watered down.
Because of the large amount of focus the big search engines put into desktop search, blinkx turned their attention and voice-recognition technology towards finding and indexing videos, podcasts and other audio files. With today’s launch, blinkx now offers the ability for users to subscribe to their own personal queries, receiving updates every time the query result changes.
In order to set-up a SmartFeed, users conduct a keyword query, select the appropriate channels they wish to receive content from and click the “Create SmartFeed” button. By doing so, readers are subscribing to the particular query, and will be notified of updates by an RSS feed, which sends a link to the user, informing them the content related to their query has updated.
According to Suranga Chandratillake, blinkx founder and CTO, “The Internet has evolved into a vast media network, with more and more multimedia content becoming available every day.”
Because a large majority of the content on the web is in a rich format, Suranga feels blinkx’s technology gives them a leg-up in providing rich, relevant content related to a users defined interest. Suranga indicates as much when he says, “blinkx’s unique automatic transcription technology and SmartFeed service help users navigate the increasing and diverse range of rich media that’s available to them.”
Users have 30 channels in which to choose from when they are establishing and creating their SmartFeeds. These channels help provide users with a more robust rich media search experience. The blinkx SmartFeed technology also supports podcasting, or in the words of Bill Gates, blogcasting (apparently, podcasting is a forbidden word in Redmond), which many believe is one of the faster growing forms of media on the Internet.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
