Word on the street is that video search is about to get a huge upgrade, courtesy of a new site called VideoSurf. Video search has been a tough nut to crack for even the likes of Google, with relevancy problems plaguing pretty much every video search engine around.
Even YouTube, what many average users would consider to be the premiere site for searching videos, has problems nailing down relevant results sometimes. The main issue with video search (along with image search) has been the fact that the search engines generally use text associated with the videos to come up with results, whether that be file names, titles or surrounding text on the video’s page.
There are exceptions to this like blinkx and EveryZing as Chris Sherman at Search Engine Land notes, that take video search a bit further with speech to text conversion, but they’re still a ways off from the bulls-eye. Sherman got a peak at VideoSurf (presumably at TechCrunch 50 where it is being displayed), and is very impressed with what he has seen. VideoSurf actually gets into the videos themselves on a frame by frame basis.
At this point, VideoSurf is only available to the public on an invitation-only basis, although you can request an invitation. I haven’t heard back yet on mine.
Sherman is so impressed, in fact, that he seems almost certain that VideoSurf will be bought by one of the big search players. If he’s right, and VideoSurf is as impressive as he lets on, this could either push Google even further up the charts of search dominance, or give Yahoo! or Microsoft a little firepower to at least stay in the search picture a while longer. Joanne Bradford says that Yahoo!’s best days are still ahead. Maybe she knows something we don’t. I’m just anxious to see whether or not VideoSurf is really worth its hype.
