AOL has finally unveiled Truveo once again, two years after it acquired the video search engine for the unofficial figure of $50 million. The re-designed web site uses the breakthrough video search that searches surrounding metadata rather than the spoken word, converted using speech recognition.
Truveo says it takes an approach called ‘visual crawling’ where crawler software behaves more like a person who is viewing each web page video is launched from. For video to be searchable, Truveo collects meaningful text metadata to associate with each video file. It relies like everyone else on mining closed-caption transcripts and importing RSS feeds. But where these are not found the Truveo crawler can ‘visually’ examine the context of the surrounding web application and find detailed metadata related to every video.
Truveo was in the process of being integrated with AOL’s previous video search acquisition Singingfish, bought back in November 2003, and it seemed to disappear from sight for a while though clearly its technology was being licensed.
Now with rival properties like Blinkx beginning to build a serious traffic load, and AOL finding itself in a world where the combination of both premium and User Generated Content seems to be what consumers are looking for, it has re-introduced Truveo.
The new version of Truveo.com is described as a one-stop destination to find video from across the web, from user-generated video clips, to professionally produced video from leading media brands.
Shutting Truveo down was a mistake in the first place. AOL should have let it build momentum of its own, and it will now suffer from a two year gap in brand building. But a quick review of the site shows it to be exceptionally easy to use, with a wide range of video and it works largely problem free, mostly by taking the viewer back to the site where the video was originally indexed from, and playing it there. It has an addictive browse and discover feel about it that is more interesting than, say, YouTube, and gives you a feeling that ALL video is here, not just a local collection.
We have been saying for years that video needs a Google, and that this is NOT Google Video, who’s search barely works and which gives inappropriate results all the time.
While it has been away the Truveo technology has been licensed to AOL Video, Microsoft, CNET’s Search.com, Qwest, Brightcove, Infospace, Excite, CSTV, Clevver, Flock, Metacrawler, Netvibes, Pageflakes, PureVideo, Sportingo, Widgetbox, YourMinis and hundreds of other sites, the company says.