blinkx

» see blinkx.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the first time i heard of blinkx it was a stock, not a search box. it was a london-listed company that tech blogs wrote about, a british video search engine with a strange lowercase name, and i read about it the way you read about a company you will never be a customer of.

suranga chandratillake founded it in 2004, spun out of autonomy, the cambridge search company. the idea was genuinely good. instead of matching video by its title and tags, blinkx ran speech recognition over the audio and indexed the words people actually said, so a search could land inside a clip and not just on its label. by the 2007 london ipo it claimed the largest video index anywhere, tens of millions of hours, hundreds of media partners.

the problem was the one every video search engine of that era hit. youtube built its own search and that was the search everyone used. blinkx was answering a question people had stopped asking. then in january 2014 a harvard researcher published a long accusation that blinkx was quietly running adware left over from companies it had bought, and the stock lost most of its value in a day. the company survived by turning into an ad-tech business and buying media brands, and in 2017 it retired the blinkx name for rhythmone.

i never used it, and that is the honest part. my video search was the youtube box like everyone else's. blinkx was a clever engine attached to a public company, admired in the trade press and ignored on the actual web, and by the time it changed its name the thing it was named for had been dead for years.

~ the record ~

~ the clever part ~

the speech-to-text indexing was ahead of its moment. searching the inside of a video instead of its metadata is something the whole industry would come back to later with far bigger models. blinkx did it in 2005 on a fraction of the compute, and it worked well enough to build a business on. the miss was never the technology.

~ what really happened ~

what killed the blinkx name was not a single shutdown notice, it was a slow conversion into something else. the adware report knocked out the trust and the share price, the video search product stopped mattering next to youtube, and the company followed its revenue into advertising. it renamed itself rhythmone and kept being sold on from there. the search engine was gone long before the ticker changed.

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