blinkx.com
Hothoused by the UK's most successful search business, Autonomy Corporation, and now valued at £55m on the London Stock Exchange, blinkx is a video search engine.
Conceived at Cambridge University by Suranga Chandratillake and a team of fellow programmers, and developed with $150m of research funding over 12 years, it launched to the public in 2005 and claims to be the largest single source of video on the web, with 26m hours indexed so far.
Like Pixsta, it is not dependent on the text tags applied to video by machines or humans. Its crawlers - the computer programmes that roam the web, indexing pages for search engines - can also listen to what is being said on a video using speech recognition technology. They can recognise over 500 famous faces.
Most importantly, they can "watch" videos to look out for text and detect scene changes. This means that in its summary of search results, blinkx can show a snippet of the footage of Comply Or Die winning this year's Grand National, rather than the talking head in the television studio announcing the news. The user knows immediately whether they've found the right video.
blinkx claims that this technology makes its results more relevant than Yahoo! and AOL's Truveo, which rely on the written labels that surround videos loaded onto a web page. advertisement
blinkx already powers video search for three of the top five search engines, including Ask.com, MSN and parts of the AOL portal. According to measurement firm Hitwise, blinkx has now surpassed Google Video in the UK with weekly market share of visits.
