• by kyle , Daisy Whitney , January 26, 2007

Ever try to navigate the Internet without search engines? Of course not: They make Web navigation and, by extension, Web advertising possible.

But given the mushrooming of Internet video in recent months, effective video search has become a big problem.

The opportunity will be huge for whoever finds the solution. Audience-measurement firm comScore has reported that U.S. Internet users initiated nearly 7 billion video streams per month, with the average streamer consuming about two videos each day. That's more than 106.5 million people, or about 60 percent, of all U.S. Internet users.

However, no one has cracked the code yet on how to sift through these videos. Once they do, the ripple effect in advertising should be massive, as marketers will be able to couple their ads with the videos returned, just as they do in text search.

And that's why companies such as AOL-owned Truveo and Blinkx are already staking out claims in the wide-open field of video search, with newcomers such as ClipBlast and PureVideo close behind.

As the elder statesmen, Truveo and Blinkx have been well-received for ease of use. Blinkx has indexed more than 7 million hours of online video from a total online pool of anywhere from 10 million to 30 million hours, says Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of the company.

Many video-search aspirants are smaller players, and that's partly because the big guns -Google and Yahoo - that have built their business on text searches have not yet found the secret sauce for video search.

Look out for CastTV in particular. The service is slated to launch in the first quarter of 2007, and though it'll be late to the party, the technology is impressive. It can actually find specific pieces of video on originating sites, such as episodes of "Grey's Anatomy" on both ABC.com and iTunes. This is no small feat, as few video-search services have been able to do that so far, instead producing results on Yahoo or YouTube. Many existing video-search services return results that are out of date or unauthorized.

Video search is a hot area because search nets trawling for videos require different coding than searches for the text and metadata on regular Web pages. A video-search engine needs to understand the video itself, says Alex Vikati, co-founder of CastTV.

But competition is fierce and the incumbents get better every day. Late last year, many of the existing sites improved their results so users searching for a TV show will get the full-length and authorized versions of those shows, too.

Another new entrant is PureVideo Networks, the parent company of viral video site StupidVideos.com. PureVideo retooled its site to become a search engine and a destination by featuring charts and lists of the popular videos on sites such as ESPN, MySpace, YouTube, and Break.