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.
from VentureBeat
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Comment: so the first time in ages that Blinks gets any press in the national press (the Telegraph article) is for a broken piece of crap that doesn't even work?
This could be one of the final nails in Chandratillake's coffin. Allowing such a debacle to go live - with appalling design, appalling user experience, search that doesn't work - is unforgiveable. Absolutely unforgiveable...
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