January marked the first operational month for video search engine OVGuide as a profit-making entity. Now it has received $5 million in funding from Baroda Ventures.
The funding will be invested in engineering resources to further develop the search engine. Dale Brock, Founder and President of OVGuide answered a few of my questions bout the search engine itself.
Chris Crum: What is OVGuide.com’s process for indexing videos?
OVGuide: We have our own proprietary search engine that categorizes and crawls all the sites in our index (now at 3,608 video sites). Dozens of rules are in place to rank the search results, which include user statistics, such as clicks and time spent on a site. We also have internal editorial scoring of the quality of a site. We index several hundred million videos and are most likely the largest video search engine in the world.
CC: Does OVGuide.com have a way to search within videos themselves?
OVG: We are currently not looking at the actual video content (image processing), since we feel it just adds to the noise of finding relevant video matches, but are working on integrating that type of technology when it would add value to our search results.
CC: OVGuide.com has been around since 2006 – what significant changes have come about since launch?
OVG: The biggest change was an improved video search engine that we spent several years developing that delivers what users want … the best matching video site and not just a bunch of related clips. Another change was the explosion and fragmentation of video sites, which just adds fuel to our offering and further shows the need for what we provide users. We started with just a few dozen video sites and now have over 3,600 of them with the number of new submissions continuing to grow each week.
CC: What kind of changes / new features are planned for the future?
OVG: More discovery features that leverage our millions of daily users to help people find content best suited for them. We plan to continue to improve our search engine and add refinements to it on a daily basis for those who know what they want to watch, but content discovery is a big initiative for us.
CC: I’d like to thank Dale for speaking with me. OVGuide offers sponsored listings in the form of contextual search and featured video site placement. The search engine gets about 36 million searches per month.
