Internet start-up company Truveo today unveiled a beta version of its video search engine technology, claiming to offer more up-to-date and higher quality results than video search products offered by Google or Yahoo. Truveo says it has developed unique technology which enables its crawlers to locate and index video that other search engines miss, in part by analyzing the visual characteristics of Web pages. The company says even though its service has only recently been crawling the Internet for video, already it provides access to material that cannot be found through other search engines.
"For search to reach the next level and become truly ubiquitous, a fundamentally new approach is required to rapidly find and organize the vast amounts of television, movie and video content created every minute." said Tim Tuttle, co-founder and CEO of Truveo. Truveo’s approach is to analyze the visual appearance of a Web page, much the way a human visitor would, potentially enabling it to find video content which would be invisible to standard crawlers (which seem to focus on links to specific media and file types). Once Truveo’s crawler has located video, it can analyze contextual details and other information associated with the video to index it with a greater degree of accuracy.
Although video search engines have been in development for almost 10 years, none of them have yet to break into the mainstream of Internet user’s consciousness, in part because of bandwidth issues (at least in the U.S., broadband is still not widely-enough deployed to make video search a ubiquitous activity) and the complicated copyright and digital rights management issues involved with placing digital video of copyrighted material on the Internet. Still, we’ve got to hand it to Truveo: any company which publicly introduces itself with a "farting preacher" video at the top of its Entertainment category might deserve a closer look.
