Blinkx launches not-quite-ready music jukebox
Blinkx Music, a newly launched
website at www.music.blinkx.com, supposedly has 33,000 hours of music videos from 10,000-plus artists. The search tool, which is indexed by artist, album, song and genre, makes it easy to dig up old U2 videos … no, actually it doesn’t. Type in “U2 Boy” and you get “Sorry, there are no results matching your query.” On YouTube, by contrast the band’s impossibly naive-and-innocent-not-yet-superstars video for “I Will Follow” arrives at the top of the search results page.
A search for the other suggested artist in blinkx’ press release, Lady Gaga returned all of 6 clips.
My guess is that Blinkx’ development team needs some more time to flesh this thing out. Blinkx is based around a search technology that parses the words spoken in videos into searchable keywords. I think they need to figure out the right algorithm for returning results that seem intuitive to human users.
The site looks nice, it’s simple, it doesn’t drive me crazy with gratuitously-sliding interface parts like Grooveshark does. It did, thankfully, find “Video Killed the Radio Star.” But in doing so, it somehow transferred me over to a Yahoo Music page. That’s the last thing I wanted.
Dear Blinkx: Come back when this thing is fully cooked, ok? I promise to give you a fair shake again.
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About the Author, Paul Boutin
Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.
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