• by joe.h , Bob Heyman , June 29, 2007

A number of recent events show how video search is maturing and becoming a real force on the Net.

First, Truveo has announced that it is now powering more than 38 million video searches per month. That number puts this AOL- owned video search engine at rough parity in search volume with Blinkx. Together, these two cross-site engines serve around 80 million video searches per month. Throw in searches within Google and YouTube and you've got a whole lot of video searching going on.

Some attribute the growth is video search to the enforcement of copyright on YouTube. When fans can no longer find a clip they like on You Tube, they often use video search to find it elsewhere.

Secondly, Blinkx recently launched Blinkx Remote, its tool for finding full-length TV programs on the Web. The tool uses speech to text transcription technology and corroborates information with Wikipedia , IMDB.com and other sources. It can find episodes by title as well as by particular season.

The trend here is that the major players are experimenting to find an iteration of video search that proves most useful to the user. It may not be the traditional text search model that prevails. The "guide" model has much to recommend it. Clearly, we're likely to see many variations as the quest for the killer video search app goes on.

Lastly, you can be sure a technology has arrived when there are contests to optimize against it. So the first-ever Video Search Engine Optimization contest was no small event. The contest started in January and attracted numerous prize sponsors. The initial prize of $2,000 got the ball rolling, and subsequent prizes offered books, software and consulting time. Users could create their own video or upload any video that Google and contest sponsor thevideosense.com would accept. In April, John Grubb became the winner, ranked highest on Google Video while using the term "my funny video."

As these developments show, video search bears watching. Stay tuned.