Buzzsonic.com

Not one but two new search options for video content on the web were unveiled today only hours apart of each other. First out of the blocks was a “test phase” version of the previously hinted at Yahoo video search. The site went up on Wednesday and competes against pioneers like the AOL owned Singing Fish which was recently upgraded.

The Yahoo video search service lets users narrow their query results by file formats, such as AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Windows Media and Real, by size and by duration (less or more than a minute). Users can also choose to filter results based on Internet top-level domains, so only results from .com Web sites would be listed, for example. Users can also choose to filter content unsuitable for minors from the search results.

Yahoo search executive Jeremy Zawodny had more to say on the company weblog. Why video? “The costs of producing video content have been steadily decreasing in recent years. Between the adoption of broadband Internet connections, and easier to use video editing software, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing a lot more video content make its way on to the Internet. And what’s out there today is just the tip of the iceberg.”

He continues to explain: “It’s often not easy for a web crawler to find downloadable and streaming video content. Unlike web images and most audio files, videos aren’t always easy to discover. When we started thinking about how to make it easier for anyone to expose video and other rich media content, one of the first things we thought of was podcasting and RSS. Podcasting uses RSS Enclosures to provide an audio file along with a news item or blog posting in an RSS feed. At the most basic level, this (new search option) is just a matter of pointing to a video instead of an MP3 file.”

Search results show a thumbnail of the video, the name of the file, screen size, length in seconds, and size in MB with 20 results per page by default (though this is customizable from 10-100).

Video search is nothing new, the Yahoo owned Alta Vista and All The Web search engines have offered a video search option for years though the technology has improved. Yahoo are now deploying a method called “Media RSS”.

Media RSS is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilities of RSS 2.0. Enclosures in RSS are already being used to syndicate audio files (Podcasting) and images. Media RSS extends enclosures to handle other media types, such as short films or TV, in addition to providing additional metadata with the media.

Only hours later Blinkx released the Beta version of Blinkx TV, which allows you to search the web for video and audio clips. Blinkx had previously been known for its downloadable desktop search app which actually beat Google’s similar offering to market in the summer. According to media sources search giant Google is courting broadcasters and cable networks with a new technology that would do for television what it has already done for the Internet: sort through and reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows. Microsoft is also developing a search engine for video.

Blog search engine Blogdigger recently revealed a media search option on their site, enabling users to specify media files in five different classes: audio:, video:, image:, torrent: and text ( a catch all including things like PDF, ZIP or Microsoft Word documents) that Blogdigger indexes from the RSS feeds used on blogs like us here at MBN24. Both Compaq and IBM have been working low key on multimedia search options for a while now too.

Related Reading

Yahoo Launches Video Search, New RSS Format [ResearchBuzz.com]
Blinkx Unveils Video Search Engine [CNet News]
Striking up Digital Video Search [CNet News]
At Yahoo, Signs Point to a Bigger Media Move [CNet News]
Search Meets TV [SearchEngineWatch.com]
TV and Search Merge [BattelleMedia.com]
AOL Revamps SingingFish Audio Video Search [MusicbizNews24.com]
Google Audio Search [Oristus.com]