Video search engines help users sort through clips
— -- The Internet is teeming with so much video that searching through it is becoming one of the biggest challenges on the Web.
Video search engines such as Blinkx and EveryZing are among those racing search giant Google to try to solve the problem. Both use speech-to-text and other technologies to make video clips easier to search and view. There's a lot at stake. The video advertising market is projected to grow to $4.3 billion by 2011, up from $410 million in 2006, researcher eMarketer says.
Search technology can read and analyze text on a website, but the same technology is limited when it comes to video. If a website called "All About Dogs" also offers information about cats, a traditional search engine can figure that out. Not so for video.
Most search engines make educated guesses about the contents of video clips based on the coding used to "tag" or identify them, or by the words other websites use to link to the clips, says Kevin Ryan, global content director for Search Engine Watch, a Web information site.
Google hopes to improve on that. The company has just launched a test of a new video search gadget for its YouTube politician channels. It uses speech-recognition technology to create searchable transcripts of videos. For instance, you can search on "health" to find a clip from John McCain, Barack Obama or many others, and even jump to where those key words appear in the video clips.
Other companies tackling video search:
Blinkx: 'Snackable' video
Video search engine Blinkx can take the audio from a video clip, break it down into the smallest distinguishable sounds in any language, and create a transcript of what is being said.
Blinkx also uses the text that appears on screen, such as scores or times displayed during a sporting event, to identify video.
"Video today is very packaged and very linear," says Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake. "There's no reason it has to be like that. It can be snackable."
Truveo: Crawling the Web
Truveo, a video search engine owned by AOL, focuses on "crawling" the Web for video clips. Crawling is the process search engines use to locate media files across millions of websites. Only when a search engine has found and built a list of video clips can users then search for what they want.
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