Valleywag: video search

Why Google should hurry up and buy Blinkx

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:20:00 PDT

Blinkx founder Suranga Chandratillake has always wanted his video search engine to be to online video what Google is to the Web. Here comes his chance. On May 24, a clause in Blinkx's IPO filings that requires the company to pay its former parent, U.K. search engine Autonomy, $50 million in case of any acquisition will expire. Both Google as well as News Corp. are said to be bidding to acquire the company. Google would be smart to cinch the deal.

Blinkx's technology is good. (And really, when have you ever heard Valleywag praise someone's technology?) But Chandratillake has never been able to make Blinkx a destination site. Google already has YouTube, and CEO Eric Schmidt has put the heat on YouTube's management to start making money. Merely applying Google's text-search techniques hasn't cut it. Perhaps Blinkx's technology, which better matches video viewers' interests to ads, could prove YouTube's Holy Grail.

Google Video gets facelift, still mostly returns results from YouTube

Jackson West — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:00:00 PDT

Google Video, which became ~~largely pointless~~ ~~a video search engine~~ largely pointless after the acquisition of YouTube, has been redesigned. The world will continue to just use YouTube search — since most of the results returned by Google Video are from YouTube anyway. [Google Video Blog]

2007's top 10 online videos

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:00:23 PST

AOL's search engine Truveo put out a list of the top video searches for 2007. The list includes Will Ferrell's Web classic "The Landlord," an excerpt of which runs above. Here's the list of videos, complete with links, so you don't have to use Truveo anymore.