Not surprisingly we’re going to see much more in the way of video or “multimedia” search from the likes of Yahoo, Google and of course Microsoft, but it looks like the Blinkx Video Search is the first one out of the starting blocks (too bad they don’t offer the results in RSS with enclosures)

“The beta offering, dubbed Blinkx TV, captures and indexes video and audio streams directly from television and radio broadcasters to make available news, sports and entertainment clips, the company said. The engine lets people group specific searches using “smart folders” that continuously collect multimedia content from sources including Fox News, HBO, ESPN, National Public Radio and the BBC World Service.” (via
CNET)

There are few specific details in this article on CNET about IBM’s push into the Enterprise Search market, but it does hint at IBM’s commitment to “higher-margin software and services” during its transition from the PC Hardware space.

“IBM is building software it hopes will make it the Google of corporate-search technology.”

“IBM is constructing a content management and search product line through acquisitions and by sifting through the results of its research and development labs.” (e.g. WebFountain)

I know, I know… first post in a long time. Trust me; I haven’t abandoned the blog — more on that another time.

Anyway, I just tested Google Suggest, the new Auto-Complete feature that’s currently in beta at Google. My first impression is that this is a wicked fast service! I hope they make it a default feature, but I imagine they’d still have to work out the scaling issues.

Beyond that, I’d like to see the Auto-Complete feature applied to all the other Google properties like GMail, Froogle, Google News and even the Google Tool Bar. I’m sure it’s in the works.

I’m not sure about the name or whether it will be a Google killjoy, but yesterday Vivísimo open to the public their consumer search service called Clusty, which utilizes results from Yahoo’s Overture engine.

At the forefront of Clusty is Vivísimo’s topic clustering of search results (hence the name). Searches can be preformed across web, news, images, shopping, encyclopedic and something called ‘gossip’.

Hidden behind the ‘Customize’ tab in Clusty are options to span your searches across eBay, Slashdot and Blogs! (although I’m not sure why they separate Slashdot and Blogs)

With Google recently releasing their IPO pricing estimates ranging between $108 to $135 per share with market capitalization between $29 billion and $36 billion, I suspect this doesn’t bode well:

Update: Apparently Google’s problems are due to the latest MyDoom worm variant (via /.)

After a week on the beaches of the Outer Banks in North Carolina with family I feel refreshed and recharged — perhaps not recharged enough to ride up l’Alpe d’ Huez, but I digress…

During my week away there were a few notable acquisitions made by Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

First up is MSFT acquisition of my current favorite personal search tool Lookout, which integrates well with Outlook and complements my archive of NewsGator subscriptions nicely.

Om Malik praises the new contextual desktop search tool called Blinkx, which is currently available in a downloadable beta client as well as a web only interface.

Om goes on to cite some attractive examples such as…

“BlinkX is all about contextual search…Say you are reading through a big Microsoft Word document… the BlinkX bar at the top of the page, will retrieve relevant news item links with brief summaries… The software basically reads the entire document and builds a contextual link database on the fly.”

At this point, PGtGM looks to only be a proof-of-concept, but essentially it is destine to be a POP3 proxy for Google’s GMail.

This is/will be a cool hack, but probably be a moot point once some of the rumored features of GMail start to roll out (namely POP3 and RSS/Atom).

I’ve been disconnected all week in PeopleSoft training, but during lunch today I caught Steve Gillmor’s eWeek column from last week about Gmail where he cites a potential example of the “Google Platform” in the enterprise.

“By the time the Gmail beta period ends in three to six months, Brin and his team have promised to enable forwarding and POP3 access. However, more is required of a corporate mail service. Those capabilities must be extended to allow Gmail to provide disconnected operation and IDE for packaged applications.”

Google opened beta 2 of Google Groups. They’ve integrated it with Gmail, which gives you the ability to post to Usenet newsgroups as well as create new groups.

All these “new” features are strangely reminiscent of what
My Deja News offered back in 1998…

Hey wait a second! Google purchased Deja back in 2001. What took them so long to integrate services?

I’m not sure, but there is progress however…

For example, you can now get an Atom Feed of your favorite newsgroups.