Blinkx to power Ask.com's video search – interview with blinkx CEO

blinkx plc (“blinkx”), already the world’s largest video search engine, today expanded its reach with the announcment of its exclusive video partnership with Ask.com – a leading multi-platform search destination and one of the top-4 platforms in total search traffic along with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.com.

The integration of video search results is a part of Ask’s “Ask3D” search strategy, which incorporates multiples categories of search, or search “verticals,” into a single page of web results. This is expected to provide an increased relevance of search results in a more well-integrated, user-friendly interface.

For blinkx, Ask.com’s new interface will provide a direct means for far more search users to access blinkx’s video database. While blinkx currently maintains the largest public video search database online, their videos will now be much more accessible to a huge segment of the online population who search Ask.com, but have never visited, and are unlikely to directly visit, blinkx.com. Ask’s new interface will likely help blinkx reach that market, and in turn, open up a considerably larger audience to video search.

In an interview with blinkx.com CEO and founder Suranga Chandratillake, he confirmed that blinkx shall be the exclusive partner of Ask.com for distribution of video search results.

“All of Ask.com’s video search results will be coming from the blinkx search engine, an showing the same information as found on the blinkx site, right down to listing the original clip source,” says Suranga. “There are some small differences in their interface design for video search results and ours, but ultimately it’s the same search engine. It’s obviously great for us in that more traffic going through our system,” and great for the huge segment of Ask.com users that doesn’t yet go directly to video search engine sties, but can now much more easily find relevant information via video search results directly into the Ask.com site.

“Which video results appear and where they appear [on the Ask.com results page] will depend on what you search for,” adds Suranga, “whether its more news-centric or video-centric.”

A few test queries in the new Ask.com interface show top video search results often fall just below text search results in its main body (on the larger, right-hand column of the search page) and randomly organized and compartmentalized along with other vertical searches. Clicking on the video link tab “More” (found both on the top of the left hand column and also under the short list of first-page video results), next reveals a page of blinkx’s “video results from select sources.” Another click shows the full database of blinkx videos for a search query. Users can also sort video results by a certain time length, and/or file type.

In addition, blinkx will also provide the video search capabilities for Ask.com’s Smart Answers. Other video services, such as blinkx remote, will still appear exclusively on the blilnkx site.) Blinkx will generate revenue from this relationship through video searches undertaken by Ask.com users.