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"

Search Engine News :: Search Engine Lowdown: Google's Patrick Keane Afraid of Search Engine Optimizers

Search Engine News :: Search Engine Lowdown: Google's Patrick Keane Afraid of Search Engine Optimizers: "However, don't you think the process should be a two-way thing? Let me get to my point...

Google's head of sales advertising, Patrick Keane, just finished a presentation here at AD:TECH. The usual stuff, with Google keeping to it's 'quite period' by having some of its AdWords customers do the talking. However, Patrick Keane was asked about whether SEO companies can really help a company to get better positioning on Google and the search engines [tick...tick]. Waiting for Patrick's response, I felt confident that, despite my reservations about SEMPO, they had at least been able to educate the key figures at Google. A positive response about SEO was surely about to leave Patrick's 'SEC regulated' lips. [tick...tick...tick...]

Oh, how I wish it had. [tick....] Patrick basically replied that there is no way to improve your rankings on Google and that any claims by a SEO company were false. [tick...tick] He suggested that a few simple 'design changes' were all that could be done and that a SEO firm wasn't needed. [tick....BOOM!!!!]

Uh, hello? Isn't Google sponsoring SES in San Jose next month...the same SES that has dozens and dozens of sessions on SEO and how to improve your ranking. Are the 1300+ clients that WebSourced assists, and the many thousands more using other SEO companies, simply imagining the great results they are getting on Google, Yahoo and other search engines? If it were not for us SEO's there would be no hype about Google's IPO right now. Granted, paid search is the revenue generating aspect of search, but who do you think created the whole search engine buzz in the first place? Us SEO's that's who! And many of "

Search Engine News :: Search Engine Lowdown: Google's Patrick Keane Afraid of Search Engine Optimizers

Search Engine News :: Search Engine Lowdown: Google's Patrick Keane Afraid of Search Engine Optimizers: "post something controversial on here. If it's about Google, you can bet that they are are on the phone to me to discuss their position and make sure that I am 'educated'"

However, don't you think the process should be a two-way thing? Let me get to my point...

Google's head of sales advertising, Patrick Keane, just finished a presentation here at AD:TECH. The usual stuff, with Google keeping to it's "quite period" by having some of its AdWords customers do the talking. However, Patrick Keane was asked about whether SEO companies can really help a company to get better positioning on Google and the search engines [tick...tick]. Waiting for Patrick's response, I felt confident that, despite my reservations about SEMPO, they had at least been able to educate the key figures at Google. A positive response about SEO was surely about to leave Patrick's "SEC regulated" lips. [tick...tick...tick...]

Oh, how I wish it had. [tick....] Patrick basically replied that there is no way to improve your rankings on Google and that any claims by a SEO company were false. [tick...tick] He suggested that a few simple "design changes" were all that could be done and that a SEO firm wasn't needed. [tick....BOOM!!!!]

Uh, hello? Isn't Google sponsoring SES in San Jose next month...the same SES that has dozens and dozens of sessions on SEO and how to improve your ranking. Are the 1300+ clients that WebSourced assists, and the many thousands more using other SEO companies, simply imagining the great results they are getting on Google, Yahoo and other search engines? If it were not for us SEO's there would be no hype about Google's IPO right now. Granted, paid search is the revenue generating aspect of search, but who do you think created the whole search engine buzz in the first place? Us SEO's that's who! And many of us are also commanding the paid search budgets of some of the world's largest companies.

Search engine optimization is real...it works...it can help you get to the top of Google. There may be some bad apples, who make totally ridiculous promises, but you get that with any industry. Please, please, someone, anyone at Google, take Mr. Keane aside and quietly remind him that search is not just about paid search and agencies. SEO may be the "red-headed step-child" as far as Google is concerned, but we are still family and deserve the respect!
- Search Engine News by Andy Beal | News Link | Others' Thoughts (18)

Google tools WebmasterBrain | Online Keyword Suggestion Tool

WebmasterBrain | Online Keyword Suggestion Tool: "Tools "Speaking of Google, one of the most useful tools for Web
Developers is at WebmasterBrain.com. Check out Prog (formerly
Proogle) at http://www.webmasterbrain.com/proogle/ which
displays Google search results with additional details, namely,
PageRank and incoming links.

Yahoo! News - Google Toolbar Can Browse By Name

Yahoo! News - Google Toolbar Can Browse By Name Google Toolbar's new Browse by Name feature, introduced on July 14, takes the concept of searching from the browser Address Bar and kicks it up a notch. All you do is type the name or description of the site you're looking for. If there's a strong match, Google will go straight to that page. For example, "new york times", "ben and jerry", "john kerry" and "strong bad" all zoom directly to the appropriate page. When there's no single obvious match, you haven't lost anything –- you still get a standard Google search results page. The functionality may remind some of the RealNames service (which shut down in 2002). Web sites could pay to register a simple phrase with RealNames as an alternative point of access for their URL. However, sites need not and cannot register for Browse by Name. If a page's relevance to the search phrase is significantly higher than all others, it will be selected. The process is dynamic –- if at a later time a different site's relevance skyrockets, then that site will be selected. There's no connection with Supported Links or AdWords, and sites cannot pay for placement in Browse by Name.


Current Google Toolbar users will be updated automatically over the next few weeks. Those who have already configured Google as their default search engine will have Browse by Name turned on by default. Others can enable it from the Options dialog. If you don't want to wait for the automated update, just download the toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com. Note that during installation you must choose whether or not to allow the toolbar to send non-personal information about the sites you visit back to Google –- if you choose otherwise, you can't get PageRank data in the toolbar. However, you need not enable advanced features to use Browse by Name.

Google adds audio and video clips search

Google, currently in a quiet period in the run-up to its much-anticipated public stock offering, is likely to make quite a bit of noise by adding audio and video clips to its search services, according to a published report.

Company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page "made no secret" of plans to add multimedia while attending the annual Allen & Co.-sponsored retreat for media executives in Sun Valley, Idaho, last week, the New York Post reported. A spokeswoman for Mountain View, Calif.-based Google could not confirm the plan, the paper reported.

Immediate speculation raised the idea Google would go beyond radio and TV clips and enter the online music business, selling downloads of music files. "You can't ignore it. There is tons of money to be made off of music," Danny Sullivan, editor of searchenginewatch.com, told the Post.

Audio and video search is already available through Yahoo's (YHOO) AltaVista and America Online's (TWX) Singingfish.com.

Google registers to list on Nasdaq | CNET News.com

Google registers to list on Nasdaq | CNET News.com: "Google has registered to be listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange for its upcoming $2.7 billion initial public offering, it said in a regulatory filing Monday. "