Autonomy succeeds where Yahoo Google MSN fail

Autonomy makes software for searching and cataloguing data such as e-mails, photos, and video footage. Blinkx, a popular video search engine and desktop search tool, works on Autonomy technology.

Autonomy uses voice recognition software that automatically catalogues and indexes every spoken word in video footages. The same technique is being used by the US agencies to eavesdrop on terrorists.

Google, MSN and Yahoo have not been hugely successful in China search market because their key-word based search engines struggle with the ideogram based alphabet. Since Autonomy relies on voice recognition and not on recognising keywords, it makes it more suitable for Chinese mulitimedia searches.

News Corp is looking to acquire Blinkx, a brainchild of Suranga Chandratillake, an-ex Autonomy employee. [via]

Google Video program requires you to upload a text transcript alongwith the video file, Autonomy would create that for you. And it would be much more accurate.

Update: Forbes is reporting that China’s Baidu.com, which listed on the Nasdaq earlier this month, has overtaken US rival Google in the key cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, which account for the majority of China’s Internet users. In Shanghai, Baidu held a 43.9 pct market share compared to a 38.2 pct share held by Google.

"Trying to index audio and video content using manual approaches like tagging is not only time-consuming, but thoroughly ineffective. blinkx’s automated approach to finding, transcribing and indexing content enables us to build our index as fast as we find content, providing our users with the largest and most current content store," said Suranga Chandratillake, CTO and founder of blinkx.

Because blinkx’s technology is entirely automated, it is extremely scalable, enabling blinkx to build a very large index including content from large media providers such as Reuters, Fox News and The New York Times Co., as well as user-generated content found in podcasts and videoblogs.

blinkx TV combines advanced speech recognition and transcription techniques with intelligent Context Clustering Technology (CCT) and a patented context prediction and synchronization technology to analyze and understand the actual content (spoken words) of an audio/video file, delivering unparalleled automation, accuracy and access to multimedia content from the web. The output of these analytical sub-processes are stored as further metadata tracks, alongside the digitally encoded content itself; not only does blinkx know what was said, blinkx knows exactly when it was said. [via]