Blinkx threat to major web search engines

New search engine technology set to rock Google and the likes

[acidic]

[business.scotsman.com...]

Unlike a traditional search engine such as Google or Yahoo, into which a user types up to ten key words which are then given equal weighting, the Blinkx software itself decides what it should be searching for.

I myself don't think this will be as successful as they are say. I believe that Google are already developing a similar technology in the form of Personalized Web Search. But it will be interesting to see this new search engine in action.

[jmccormac]

From the "press release masquerading as news" department of the newspaper in question. Forgive me for being cynical but most of the article that appear in newspapers about the internet and software in general are nothing more than press releases with a headline and a by-line. This article looks the same. The initial media interest in Blinkx has worn off to some extent now that the Google IPO hype is over. Blinkx now has the hard task of actually convincing people to download and use its product. Since the 'userfriendliness' of the Blinkx product is low compared to the simplicity of using a search engine, the majority of internet users will ignore it. Blinkx's best option is to have it bundled with some of the browsers or with new computers. However faced with competing products hitting the market, and more importantly with the major search engines offering similar options, Blinkx could find the path ahead tough.

Regards...jmcc

[boselecta]

Unlike a traditional search engine such as Google or Yahoo, into which a user types up to ten key words which are then given equal weighting

I'm not sure who came up with that but search engines definitely do not give words equal weightings.

[jmccormac]

I'm not sure who came up with that but search engines definitely do not give words equal weightings.

It sounds good for Blinkx though. It is either the journalist's lack of knowledge or it is either in the press release.

Regards...jmcc

[robjones]

The path ahead looks like it will be tough for blinkx alright; it will need a behaviour change from users, which won't be easy.
But from my own testing of it, it's a very cool program and another aspect of search that hasn't been explored properly yet.

[jmccormac]

[desktop.google.com...]

I guess that wraps things up for Blinkxx.

Regards...jmcc

[phaze]

I'm not sure who came up with that but search engines definitely do not give words equal weightings.
It sounds good for Blinkx though. It is either the journalist's lack of knowledge or it is either in the press release.

Stemming and stopwords are so popular now, MySQL includes stopwords in their current version and stemming is in version 5. Of course the unwashed masses don't have a clue, so reporters get to spin it however they like.