According to blinkx founder Suranga Chandratillake, podcasting is one of the fastest growing mediums ever, with large amounts of new content coming out daily. Insight into Suranga’s mindset sheds light on the reasoning behind the newest feature to be integrated into the blinkx search engine: the ability to search podcasts.
Blinkx Embraces Rich Media Search
Today, blinkx officially debuted their new ability to analyze, decipher, and index the growing amount podcasts and video blogs (vlogs), giving users to ability to conduct keyword-based queries in order to find podcasts and vlogs of interest. By making use of their proprietary speech recognition and video analysis software instead of just metadata, blinkx can offer a thorough multimedia-based index, with all of the content supporting user-initiated keyword searches.
To learn more about the blinkx recognition software, read their white paper (pdf).
When standard keyword searches using blinkx are done, podcasts related to the query will show up mixed in with the rest of the results, although they will be labeled. However, if users want to search only blinkx’s podcast index, they can select this option and their query results will contain podcasts relevant to the query. Podcasts appearing in search results are designated as such by a podcast icon:
Demonstrating their commitment to podcast searches, blinkx.tv offers users 20000 channels of different podcast, which is set-up similarly to a web directory. While speaking to Suranga, he indicated these channels are filled with hundreds of hours of content on a daily basis. When their podcast/vlog support was officially launched at 12 am EST this morning, their podcast index boasted over a hundred thousand unique files.
Commenting in the company’s press release, Suranga offered some words concerning the intentions of this latest blinkx update, “The volume of rich media content online continues to explode, but traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo were developed for text-based keyword searches, not for audio or video content. The prevalence of broadband and multimedia is driving demand for next generation search capabilities, and blinkx is the only technology that can offer this to Web users.”
This means that while blinkx certainly supports text-based queries, their index is obviously not limited to that style of content. Again, blinkx credits their ability to support rich media to their voice and video recognition indexing software.
Not only does blinkx have the means to understand what they are trying to index, they also have a number of spiders crawling the web looking for new podcasts and vlogs, which ensures their index will remain fresh and current, provided people continue to produce them. Users can also submit their podcasts and vlogs to blinkx, which can be done so by visiting this page.
Has podcasts and vlogs continue to grow in their popularity, blinkx will be prepared to receive the growing deluge of content. Equipped with their recognition software, blinkx promises to deliver relevant search results based on the content of the rich media being indexed. With their podcast index increasing exponentially on a daily basis, blinkx has certainly positioned themselves as major players when it comes to supporting the search for rich media-based content.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest search news.
