Guardian Unlimited | Online | All eyes on Blinkx the woman taking on Google

Guardian Unlimited | Online | All eyes on Blinkx: "All eyes on Blinkx

Victor Keegan spoke to the woman taking on Google

Thursday July 15, 2004
The Guardian

Less than a month ago, Kathy Rittweger went to the office of the technology magazine Business 2.0 in San Francisco to demonstrate Blinkx, a late entrant to the search engine market. The editor she was meeting brought two other people as he didn't know much about the subject himself.
She left the office at noon, saddened that it had not gone very well. "I thought I did a lousy job. I've never really done this whole PR thing." She retired round the corner to Starbucks with her public relations adviser for a debriefing. He told her to be more provocative in future, not so humble and more proud of what she had accomplished. "He was also convinced we didn't stand a good chance".

But by the time she had got back to her hotel, there was an email from one of the people at the meeting, Om Malik, whom she had never heard of. He said he had "blogged" the item on his website at 12.40pm while she was still commiserating over coffee.

Malik wrote that he had the same tingling sensation watching Blinkx being demonstrated as he had had almost five years ago when two fresh-faced boys called Larry and Sergey had stopped by the offices of Forbes.com to demonstrate something called Google.

Malik's comments were soon picked up by other bloggers and Rittweger started getting a wave of emails and calls, including some from venture capitalists, a breed thought to be in hibernation after the dotcom excesses.

The blog was posted on a Friday, and by the Monday there were 5,000 links to it and people were discussing it all over the world. Since then, there have been 130,000 direct downloads, and many more through users swapping files. This week, the site - which is only launched today - has been recording 6m links or hits a day solely from word-of-mouth publicity.

You would be forgiven for thinking that Rittweger and her British business partner, Suranga Chanratillake, who used to work for the UK search engine company Autonomy, ought to be locked up for even thinking of trying to take on the almighty Google, especially at a time when it and the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo - not to mention dozens of smaller companies - are teeing up for the next battle in the search engine wars.

Blinkx has two selling points. First, it doesn't only search the web but simultaneously scours news sites, emails, attachments and your own hard disk. It does all this unobtrusively in the background until you pass your cursor over icons at the top or bottom of the page, when it reveals a digest of related sites as well as material from Word, Excel or PDF files. If you are working in a word processing document, it provides the same service.

It also searches blogs. This function has just been added because Malik suggested it would be a good thing to do. "I didn't appreciate the significance until he wrote the article and then I thought, 'Right, I get it'," she said disarmingly. Blinkx can also search digital TV on the internet, which, in practice, means video output from the BBC. Why? "Because the BBC posts its digital TV free on the internet."

Both Google and Microsoft are working on unified engines that search your desktop as well as the web, and some others already do it. But Rittweger believes Blinkx is the only one that offers all these facilities including video search now. So the company has a window of opportunity in a market where consumers can switch allegiance with two blinkx of an eyelid.

The second selling point is that, unlike Google, it uses artificial intelligence to rate stories, not page rankings. "What it is trying to say," she explains, "is that all words are not equal in a sentence... Quite critically, if you are looking at a document and trying to figure out what it means, Blinkx reads everything you are reading and sorts out what are the key ideas."

Blinkx's planned business model involves getting advertising revenue from contextual adverts, product channels and white labelling, but she emphasises that the search is independent: it is mathematically based and just looks at words and their context. She adds: "It is clean, but users don't know that so we show our advertisements in a different colour".

Her moment of truth came when doing a project on Japanese tourism a few years ago and found that when she put a page into a search engine, nothing happened because search was limited to 10 words. Later, she met Suranga Chanratillake, who shared her ideas and had the technological expertise to develop them.

Whether they succeed is an open question. It is a tough market to crack because for many users, Google is as good as it gets - and, like Yahoo and Microsoft, it has immense resources. But people are also starting to realise that search engines are mining only a tiny proportion of available knowledge. And loyalty is only as deep as the click of a mouse. files. This week"