Podscope vs. Podzinger: A Podcast Search Engine Cage Match?
I received this from the powers that be over at Podscope today (with the subject line of “More Hogwash from Podzinger”):
“In the lead paragraph of its news release yesterday, BBN says of its PodZinger podcast search engine, “PodZinger’s new video search feature introduces the only available Web site that allows users to search each and every word of audio segments of video, quickly pinpointing precise results from an ever-growing universe of online video.†(emphasis added.)
Completely untrue – for the second time – two news releases in a row. Podscope.com has provided video podcast search since May of 2005, fully 10 months before Podzinger annouced it added video podcasts.
Podscope.com, from TVEyes Inc., was the first search engine to enable search by the spoken word within podcasts. It created the innovation that allows users to listen to snippets of audio to determine if content is relevant before downloading a large audio or video file. It was launched April 2005, nine months before PodZinger. Podscope created the segment that PodZinger entered. That’s the truth.”
The last updated entry over at the official Podscope blog from April 17, 2005 confirms the time frame:
“Podscope is the first search engine that actually allows you to search for spoken words within any audio or video file. We’re starting with podcasts and will be adding all types of multimedia in coming months.”
And there’s another quote on their parent company TVEyes official site, which powers Podscope’s search technology:
“TVEyes is the first company to deliver real-time TV and Radio search across multiple languages on an international platform. Services are provided to a wide range of users in both consumer and professional markets including Government and Law Enforcement Agencies. The company uses a range of proprietary technologies to index audio feeds that allow Radio and TV to be searched by keyword – just as you would use a search engine for text.”
But then we’ve got this from PodZinger’s About Page:
” PODZINGER, powered by 30 years of speech recognition research from BBN Technologies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, transforms the audio into words, unlocking the information inside podcasts.”
The timeline of BBN events states that while they might not have been using spoken word recognition to search through podcasts for a super long time, they have been fiddling around with the technology for three decades.
Who’s right, who’s wrong…I’ve got an email in to the folks over at Podzinger and Podscope regarding this and I’ll update as I get more information.
