Not sure these days that it’s a good strategy to say your search is better than Google, Yahoo and MSN, but that’s what Blinkx thinks of its new podcasting search, at least:

[Blinkx] uses voice-recognition software to search multimedia files, delivering what it claims are more accurate results than the major portals, such as Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s MSN and Google Inc.

The reason this kind of gauntlet throwing is usually a bad idea is because most of these also ran search engines can’t backup the claim. It will get people like me to visit their site for a few minutes and test how good the service really is by comparison. And the results are usually comical — in a bad way.

I tried a couple searches for older Webmaster Cookbook shows using the name “Chef TD” and Blinkx did find one of the shows, but wasn’t smart enough to figure out the true source of the show (webmastercookbook.com). Most of the results had nothing to do with me or the Webmaster Cookbook podcast. The “chef” monniker duped the Blinkx search into food mode and it was returning results for food-related podcasts. Even when enclosing “Chef TD” in double quotes it didn’t significantly alter the result set.

(Note to new readers: I almost always used ego searches because there is nobody’s business on the web I know better than our own, so it’s the perfect search engine test)

Next I tried the same “Chef TD” search in Google and the 10th result on the front page was Webmaster Cookbook. Yahoo? #13 result. MSN? #3. So actually, MSN was the best of the three in determining the true site for Chef TD.

Ok, so let’s try a much more well known podcaster: Adam Curry. MSN: 2nd result, Yahoo: first result, Google: first result, Blinkx: the first result is a podcast entitled: “I hate Adam Curry.” I clicked another first page result and it 404′d. Great!

Obviously two specific tests are not nearly enough to compare how great this voice recognition search from Blink performs. However, the average user isn’t going to run dozens of specific queries before judging the quality of a new search engine. Let’s hope that Blinkx does better with other searches than it did with mine.

Podscope is another search engine doing something similar. “Chef TD” doesn’t return any results there, but Adam Curry has a page of podcasters who are talking about Adam Curry. It will be useful when somebody has a Google quality search for videos and podcasts, but I think we’re still a long way from that happening.

• Yahoo Mindset: shopping to research
• Yahoo Toolbar for IE gets Y!Q DemoBar functionality
• blinkx local search helper
• Who has a bigger penis, Google or Yahoo?
• Now Google remembers your searches
• Yahoo Podcasts gives podcasters more free exposure