Google and Yahoo may be neck and neck in competing for the top customer satisfaction scores, but AOL is doing its best to hang in the competitive market for search engines as well. On Thursday, the company unveiled a new version of its video search engine Truveo, a site it first acquired in 2006.
Truveo takes aim at go-to video sites like YouTube by aggregating both amateur and professional content from all over the web. “While today’s popular video sharing sites offer a wide variety of user-generated video, they rarely give users the opportunity to find professional, mainstream video,” said Timothy Tuttle, CEO and co-founder of Truveo, in a statement. “The new Truveo.com solves this problem.”
For instance, a search for “The Daily Show” turns up actual clips of the show, offered for free through Comedy Central. By directing users to the content hosts’ sites to watch videos, AOL also hopes Truveo will help avoid copyright snags. A major competitor for Truveo may be Blinkx, a site that offers that same kind of video search aggregation.
Besides search, Truveo also attempts to organize content into categorizes in order to make discovering new content easier. Users can browse through clips of a single show, from a single network, or in a general category such as “news.” They can also rank clips based on popularity to see what everyone else is watching.
