Lycos targets video search with Blinkx partnership

Old school search company Lycos will announce this morning that it’s partnering with video search company Blinkx to power video search on Lycos.com. The video search feature is available now. Everybody wants to nail down video search these days, but Blinkx has some interesting technology. This is the second move by Lycos we’ve reported on this month – new giant email rivaling Gmail’s storage was the first.

Blinkx stands out because it indexes not just text metadata but also the spoken word in video footage via speech recognition. The company reported this summer that it’s now indexed more than 4 million hours of audio and video content. Thus the new Lycos video search page also includes the option to search audio content as well. It’s a lot like Podzinger but for international video, with an emphasis on educational content. Blinkx CTO Suranga Chandratillake told me today that if it’s Brittany Spears you want then it’s Brittany Spears you’ll get at Blinkx – but if it’s a particular phrase being used by Condaleeza Rice on TV, then Blinkx’s technology is really what you are looking for. Just search once and subscribe to the results feed, because you don’t want to go back more than once to the site until it undergoes the redesign Chandratillake tells me is coming. (The UI is injurious.)

Google Video isn’t actually a Google (search the web) for video, Chandratillake says, and so Blinkx seeks to be. I like Blinkx’s search results, I’ve subscribed to several feeds from them for some time and I go to them every time I want to do news video search. I hope that the emerging importance of video search will propel them, or someone with similar technology, past the world of trashy content and marginal partnerships. Perhaps this deal with Lycos will be a good fresh beginning in a new era when video search is believed to be important.