Truveo, a California startup, has launched a beta of a new video search engine that looks for content by analyzing visual characteristics of a Web page rather than just text. The firm claims its Visual Crawler technology produces more comprehensive and more up-to-date video search results than competitors.
The company has been crawling the Web for video for about two months and has indexed more content than rival services. They didn’t say how many content sources are in its index.
The Web site lets users compare results for specific searches from Yahoo and Google. For example, a search on “John Roberts” on Truveo located 274 results, with video at the top from the Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation hearings on sites including The New York Times, Yahoo News and others.
The same search on Yahoo uncovered 129 results, with a range of video from news broadcasts, many of which mentioned Roberts but were not focused on him.
Using Google, four results were returned, three completely unrelated to John Roberts, when quotation marks were not used to specify exact phrase, and only one result related to him when quotation marks were used.
Blinkx.com video search turned up about 50 results, from sources like CNN, MSNBC and many from podcasts.
Truveo plans to make money from ads that run alongside search results as well as by licensing its search listings to other destination sites.