• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 11, 2006

In an effort to improve its video search service, America Online on Tuesday announced the acquisition of video search startup Truveo. While the deal--which closed several weeks ago--is estimated to be worth between $25 million and $50 million, executives from both companies would only say the buy is the biggest since AOL picked up the online marketing company Advertising.com for $435 million in 2004.

"A lot of our value proposition has been around a broadband portal, so we've had an interest in video and video search for some time," said Jim Riesenbach, AOL Search's senior vice president.

Truveo--made up of 12 engineers--has been brought on board to help AOL's Singingfish audio/video search engine scour the Web for relevant content and then point visitors to the sites where they can view it. AOL acquired Singingfish more than two years ago.

AOL has another video search product, AOL Video, which it launched over the summer to help users search and then play back its 20,000 or so licensed and originally produced videos from Time Warner, including TV programs and music videos, Warner Bros. movie trailers, and news clips from CNN and MSNBC, as well as video from content partners including HBO, New York Times digital, and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, among others.

Singingfish has an existing video index of about 2.5 million, while Truveo has an existing store of about 2 million videos indexed, according to Riesenbach, who said there is very little overlap between the two because of their contrasting search technologies.

Truveo, which just launch last September, uses a unique three-pronged search and indexing process: Its crawler searches the transcript text of a video and the text of Web pages that accompany a video, and also recognizes the visual characteristics of a Web application with video, according to its co-founder and CEO Tim Tuttle.

"Our technology basically takes a screen shot of a Web page and is able to examine the entire object space to determine whether it contains video or not," Tuttle explained upon Truveo's launch. "There's no need for text." Tuttle added that the Truveo doesn't need to rely on content publishers embedding keywords, or meta-tags, on video clips.

The company has relied on revenue from Google's AdSense program, and from licensing its search technology to content publishers.

Google, alternately, scans metatags video clips, while Yahoo! searches for keywords and media files. The privately held Blinkx also uses voice recognition to match with search terms.