Online video content search engines

In the previous post Video Content Everywhere I was mentioning a couple of concerns related to video based content. Today, I am listing two some of the existing video content search engines.

People are now looking for the videos in search. It’s gone from serendipitously finding videos or someone forwarding it to you, to actively going out and searching for it. (Bill Tancer)

After looking at a couple of video content sites I have expressed a couple of personal concerns related to this type of content:

• it is still hard to be indexed and searched
• it is hard to skim over video content and measure its relevance
• it is quite impossible to reference/quote specific fragments
• it is way quite hard to produce high quality content, while producing low/crappy quality is way too easy

so I have decided to look what solutions are available at this moment. I have put together a list of the major solutions:

• Altavista Video Search
• AOL Video
• Blinkx
• Fooooo
• Google Video
• Lumerias
• Mamma Metasearch
• mefeedia
• Pixsy
• Truveo
• uLinkx
• Y! Video

blinkx, which claims to be the world's largest and most advanced video search engine, explains what is needed to achieve good indexing results while working on video content:

blinkx listens to the sound track using speech-to-text technology, looks at the images on screen using advanced video analytics, and reads other information embedded into the file by using media-analysis plug-ins to extract, for example, closed captioning. In this way, blinkx is processing as much information as possible to enable both extremely accurate search, and more advanced operations such as automatic hyperlinking of related content or implicit query, which understands the content a user is producing and viewing.

Most of the above video search engines (those that are not directly hosting video content) have developed partnership networks with some of the most well known video sites, but I guess the next step would be to have their technologies adopted or plugged directly into these so that the search can be performed on site.

In case I have missed any of the existing video search engines, please leave a comment and I will update the above list.

Related:

• Video Content Everywhere
• Web Search Engines Lead Way to Video
• Narrowing the Search in Online Video