Courtesy of altsearchengines ... go to: http://www.altsearchengines.com/2009/01/06/2009-list-of-video-search-engines/. Missing are some of the enterprise search engines like critical mention, but this is a very nice list.

Viewdle is on my watchlist ... they have technology that recognizes people within videos by using a unique facial recognition technology. Currently only Reuters labs uses their system, but they look to be launching some products in beta very soon. I really like the potential for this technology; couple it with better voice recognition, and suddenly video search becomes much more useful. In addition, if they can somehow leverage the technology to identify marks and logos, you'll see an even bigger improvement in the results.

See the test widget/link below.

Micheal Huckabee

Good idea (categorizing videos from academic sources), but YOVISTO (http://www.yovisto.com/) needs to index a great many more videos before it becomes relevant as a major search engine.

Looking to waste some time? Check out HULU (www.hulu.com) or South Park Studios (www.southparkstudios.com). Hulu certainly is growing in popularity ... where else can you find old Lost in Space Episodes? Give HULU a try ... would be interesting if/when some of the satellite providers get into this action, or partner with them ... I'd love to be able to view the HULU stuff on my TV (without having to rewire the house).

Wow! That's my initial impression of Viewzi (www.viewzi.com), a new web search visualization site that does some really cool things with websearch. Basically, Viewzi does away with all of the text links, replacing them with well-designed and intuitive results pages ... with a visual flair. Try typing in a company name, then choosing the Google Timeline view ... suddenly, you can get a quick picture of that company's activities in the past few months. Add to that custom news displays, video, audio, shopping and others ... this could be a game changer, if people adapt to the new modes of search. I'm going to evaluate this site further during the upcoming weeks, but I'm really liking what I see so far. Hopefully they'll be able to build on this beta release ... I can see uses for not only personal users but business users as well.

AT&T just launched a new video search engine "VideoCrawler" (http://www.videocrawler.com/), bringing yet another player into this crowded space. Like others, VideoCrawler allows searching, rating, tagging and sharing of video plus audio, Internet radio, Internet TV, games and ring tones.

Clipta just announced an investment in their video search engine business via Press Release. Clipta is now in live beta.

Check out: http://childrens-tv.blinkx.com/, BlinkX now has a filtered version of their video search engine designed for kids, although I'm kind of interested in some of the videos on the homepage ... hey, I loved watching all of those shows when I was a kid.

Moreover, an aggregator of primarily free sources of news information available via the Internet; has a free feed generator for the rest of us at http://www.feeddirect.com/. See the sample feed below for video search. 

VideoSurf, a new video search engine is now in "live beta" (does anything ever come off beta these days <G>), and it is worth a look for anyone needing to search publicly available videos on the net. Aside from the abilty to jump into the middle of a video to view a specific scene, which is a time saver, as well as providing valuable video cues as to the content of the video (see below image for an example of the navigation elements).

 Relevancy for the sample searches I tried was quite good; company searches retrieved clips about the companies ... VideoSurf will be useful for media monitoring and competitive intelligence. Definitely consider adding VideoSurf to your search toolbox. 

Eyealike, a startup in the image recognition and video search area (http://www.eyealike.com/) has several products that could help those looking to find a date based on similarity of looks, manage digital copyrights on CGM sites, as well as serving up ads based on the image on an add. 

The ad technology, which was announced today (http://www.eyealike.com/news.php?spgId=pr_13102008), could help match ads with images or videos on a site ... if I have a picture of my cat on a site, the technology may decide to serve up furball removers or other relevant ads for felines.

This is a pretty cool technology; I'm most interested in the ability of the software to recognize trademarks, and other non-facial images. In addition, I'd be interested to learn if their Eyealike™ Copyright product could also be leveraged to detect duplicate videos posted on CGM sites (how many times do we need to see the same corporate spoof video ... do a youtube search on any popular ad campaign to retreive a flood of duplicate videos). While this it is important to know about these videos, media monitoring apps don't really need 20 copies of the same video in their database, just a link to one video, with metadata telling how many times it was posted on the web. 

As I've noted in earlier posts, video/image search is a good opportunity for startups ... Google doesn't really do it that well (yet).  

I took another brief look at Pixsy today. While I like the search response, and the content sources searched by Pixsy, I'm still not happy with the duplicate videos returned by the system (duplicates of the same video hosted on different systems, or the same videos posted multiple times on a host like YouTube). Test this out by doing a search for a popular company (one that advertises a fair amount) like American Express or Mastercard ... you'll find duplicate videos.

It would be useful for Pixsy to include a checkbox (and yes, I know this would not be a trivial undertaking) allowing the searcher to "opt-out" of the duplicate videos (perhaps also allowing you to set a preferred list of providers). There is much to like about Pixsy, and I'll continue to use them as a source for my video search needs.

More about Pixsy at: http://www.pixsy.com/default.aspx. 

 

 

VideoSurf, a new video search engine is currently in beta at: http://www.videosurf.com/ .

This site offers many features:

• Ability to start videos at certain segments
• Searches multiple video sources (Google, YouTube, MySpace, etc.)
• Short text description included
• Ability to run alerts against search strings

This is another site to watch ... video search needs improvement.

Just read about a study (done by the folks at Truveo) claiming that Truveo had the most comprehensive video search results The study compared Truveo, Blinkx, Google Video, Microsoft Live Video Search and Yahoo! Video Search against a series of standard queries. I won't be suprised if the other search engines come out with studies claiming something different ... this simply illustrates that this market is still emerging, and much work needs to be done before a "Google" emerges in video search. 

Read more about this study at: http://www.finchannel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20464&Itemid=10. 

Google is adding the indexing of the audio from video clips to their searches of Google Video and YouTube. While currently an experimental feature, this could be another "killer" application for search. Media Monitoring companies will certainly be able to use this feature, as they need to be able to find client mentions from all media types. It will be interesting to see if Google decides to extend this technology out to other audio formats, such as broadcast radio ...

Read more about this at: http://labs.google.com/gaudi.