Quintura Now on to Visualise Video Search – Where Is the Limit?

(Previously, on elsua – The Knowledge Management Blog, at ITtoolbox)

Tags: Quintura, Blinkx, Search Engines, Search 2.0, Knowledge Tools, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Content Management, Google, Visualisation, Video, Video Search

You may remember how there have been a few times that I have been talking in both of my Internet weblogs about one particular search engine that, as time goes by, I am really starting to be very fond of: Quintura. Yes, that is right! I know that most people out there would say that why should you bother with other search engines when you have got Google, the one and only, right? Well, I have said this in the past, and I guess I will be saying it as well once more: just because of that very same reason. Because it is always a good thing to check out things from the other side and see if they would still stick together for you.

In my own case, Google doesn’t stick together as much as I would be hoping for. There are times where I am looking for something a bit more innovative than just another regular search engine and in that particular case I have got a bunch of dedicated innovative search engines that I have grown to become very fond of. One of such pack is Quintura and by the looks of it, I am not sure what you think, but it seems that things are getting even better. And not just for Quintura.

You probably have seen this already elsewhere, but still I think it would be a good thing to include it over here as well for the sake of the flow from this weblog entry. A couple of days ago I got an e-mail from Yakov where he was announcing that Quintura and Blinkx are to Visualise Video Search. Now, how cool is that? Or, better, how innovative is that? *Very*. Well, here is an excerpt of the announcement:

"Blinkx, the largest video search engine on the Web, has announced that Quintura, a visual discovery engine dedicated to finding web-based entertainment easier and more intuitive, will use blinkx to power video search on www.Quintura.com.

Quintura employs a unique graphical user interface with an interactive tag cloud to visually navigate and easily refine searches. Quintura’s neural networking technology discovers related search terms to the initial query and presents those terms as the interactive tag cloud. Users can then refine or narrow down their searches by clicking on any word or phrase in the cloud.

Under the terms of the agreement, blinkx will power a video search functionality on www.Quintura.com, allowing Quintura to leverage results from blinkx’s index of over 7 million hours of rich media content."

Are here you have got a couple of quotes from both parties involved:

""blinkx’s large video index is a perfect compliment to our graphical user interface,"said Yakov Sadchikov, CEO and Founder of Quintura. "As the Web becomes more visual and rich with content, people are looking for better ways to find video online. blinkx’s video search index combined with Quintura’s visual discovery engine provides users with a unique search experience. This new service has become possible due to technology innovations of our companies in visualizing search and indexing online video."

"We are excited to be powering video search for Quintura," said Suranga Chandratillake, CTO and Founder of blinkx. "Through blinkx’s advanced speech recognition technology, we are able to deliver better results than typical rich media search engines, giving Quintura users the ability to find, experience and share all forms of online video.""

Yes, indeed, I will say it again. How innovative is that? In an Internet world where more and more rich media is being produced all over the place there is a time where you probably need to step away from conventional search engines to still be able to find all of that social media content, because there is probably a time where you would need to watch that video or find that important presentation recorded in video format, or watch that particular screencast on how a particular tool works and so forth, and perhaps there may be certain search engines not apt for the job.

Well, definitely both Quintura and Blinkx are not having that problem, because this particular announcement is certainly going to help them become a whole lot more attractive from the perspective of being able to not only provide the right content at the right time, but also from a wider range of social media tools, which is, after all, what we are all probably looking for. A single point of entry where we can search for any kind of related content to the topics we are interested in. And both Quintura and Blinkx certainly do a great job in that, I tell you.

I know that in the past I have not been weblogging much about Blinkx, but I have still been using it quite extensively all of the place, because otherwise where do you think am I getting all of the different inspiring videos I have been sharing all along 🙂 And certainly now with the joint work put together between Quintura and Blinkx things are going to get easy, way *too easy*, to find all of the content you would be interested in the first place. That is for sure.

This is just what innovation is all about and in an area that you probably thought it was all done and invented, right? Well, not quite. Here you have got two interesting players showing us all that we may not have reached the limit just yet…