• MarketWatch, Wednesday, November 15, 2006 12:45 PM

The goal is to find the most relevant video. There are several reasons why organizing video for search is more complicated than text. For one thing, clips are encoded in many different technologies and formats, from Windows media files to Real Player files to Flash--but they also appear in many different Web sites like Yahoo Video, YouTube, and Revver.

Then there's professionally produced content from CNN.com, CBSNews.com, even News Corp.'s MySpace. What do you use to make that information searchable? Even if you can find out a way to incorporate metadata, somewhere along the line you have to incorporate the audio and visual information, too. Another problem is monetizing that information, once it becomes searchable--and then finding a way to rank it relevantly.

When you consider all these factors, cracking the video search code looks far from easy. And MarketWatch doesn't expect Google to do it, since they don't index the Web. For the time being, CastTV, a video-search site, tops the list of pretenders to the vacant throne.

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