Just interviewed Suranga Chandratillake, the co-founder of Blinkx, the new search engine I am testing out. Amazing story. You could look at it from so many angles: the death of text-based search, managing information overload, or even from the perspective of what-is-this-guy-thinking (treading on the toes of the 800-pound gorillas, Google, Yahoo and MSN!)

But that still won’t be getting to the crux of what Blinkx is all about. (You’ll have to wait for my article on this.) I am a big believer in customization, and can see this search company as taking information management down that path. Marketers will love what’s coming, because they have declared very clearly that the mass media model is broken. (Remember P&G’s Jim Stengel’s warning shot to the televison-is-everything crowd?)

People spend gobs of money to ‘advertise’ on a search engine, swallowing up every keyword, but that cannot be the only way. Being satisfied with that is like saying plonking down $1.5 million on a Super Bowl ad is smart targeting! Speaking of targeting, heck, even medicine is aggressively pursuing the path of ‘targeted’ drugs. Seriously! Check the latest Newsweek special issue that talks about ‘treatments designed not for massive conquest but for narowly targeted strikes..’ But I digress.

How targeted can a search engine be? I put this hypothetical question to Suranga: What if I was searching for a particular song, used in a BBC television report on the 3rd of July, covering the Live8 concert in Moscow. Can his search engine do that? Potentially, yes, he replied. For now, it is the only engine that exhaustively searches audio (podcasts, for instance) and video. And it’s going to get phenomenally better, he promises.