Blinkx's technology is good. (And really, when have you ever heard Valleywag praise someone's technology?) But Chandratillake has never been able to make Blinkx a destination site. Google already has YouTube, and CEO Eric Schmidt has put the heat on YouTube's management to start making money. Merely applying Google's text-search techniques hasn't cut it. Perhaps Blinkx's technology, which better matches video viewers' interests to ads, could prove YouTube's Holy Grail.

NICK DOUGLAS — Press release titles are usually as boring as a webcam in Bill Gates's bedroom. But the headline "Quintura and blinkx to Visualize Video Search" sounded exciting. Could I search the actual visual content of videos? Navigate a pane-based grid of playable results instead of a stupid link list? Nope. "Visual search" means a tag cloud.

• The copyright issue: The top question after Google buys YouTube is, "Will media companies sue over pirated content?" If they do, Google is ready, thanks to its experience defending Google Book Search against publishers, keeping Google Video out of its own copyright suits, and years of fighting for the right to host image thumbnails and cached web pages.