SEARCHING for good videos

Where do you go to find the latest Web video of your favorite actress, especially the recent one with her flipping out when surrounded by paparazzi?

Three years ago you didn’t have that many choices. Today, as the Web has shifted dramatically toward image and video content, you can choose from about a dozen specialized video-search sites.

While Google rules among search engines for news, text or images, that company is not the king of the hill when it comes to video search.

“As a result (of Google not dominating), there’s a bit of a gold rush occurring for video search,” said Chase Norlin, the CEO of Seattle-based Pixsy. Pixsy, launched in 2005, has become one of the top three search-engine providers for video content.

With a staff of 13 and a second office in San Francisco, Pixsy designs and provides customized video searches for hundreds of other Web sites that want to feature video for their visitors.

Three of Pixsy’s customers are the sites Travelocity, NationalLampoon.com and Lycos.com. All three sites added search engines powered by Pixsy to provide relevant video for their visitors but also to build more Web traffic.

The major challenge faced by any video search company, said Norlin, is keeping up with the flood of new video on Web sites. U.S. sites add at least five million videos to the Web each month.

Norlin estimates the current number of Web videos on U.S. sites at roughly 50 million, with no sign of slowing down.

Pixsy and the other video search engines all index – organizing results into keywords – more or less the same way. They use RSS feeds to track video content on thousands of Web sites around the globe. RSS, which stands for really simple syndication, is a widely used Web notification process. By signing up for an RSS feed at any site, any new content will quickly deliver a “feed” that informs the subscriber what the new material is.

From those feeds, sites like Pixsy can extract metatags, or keywords and other relevant data that describe what videos are about and how long they are. Then Pixsy organizes the results in categories and groupings, such as comedy, sports, movies, news, activities, TV, whatever.

That method works well for indexing the most recent videos uploaded onto sites and tracking their content by subject, keywords or category. Another subset of video search involves actually converting all the speech in a video into text, and then indexing the text for content.

Blinx, EveryZing and Criticalmention.com are three major firms taking on that extra search challenge, Norlin said.

But that still leaves Pixsy and its main competitor, AOL’s Truveo, focusing heavily on keeping track of video as it sprawls and expands across the Web.

Good search engine results, Norlin and others in the industry have learned, depend more on relevance and freshness, rather than depth of searching.

Of course, every search engine indexes and collects tags from YouTube‘s site, Norlin said. But the way companies distinguish themselves is to keep finding new sites with video to index and organize. Norlin said Pixsy’s list is “thousands of sites” that provide video ranging from self-produced amateur flicks to broadcast-quality segments from TV shows or commercial movies.

“So you have the Web getting more and more visual, and that creates the challenge of getting good at searching it,” Norlin said.

“We’re still at the beginning of that business. It’s like how Google was a few years after they started. They didn’t really know what they were doing until later. The same applies to video search now.”