Two
Wall Street Journal writers conducted a video search taste test, and found AOL Video Search, Yahoo Video Search and Blinkx TV to be the best, as they search the entire Web. Sites like
YouTube.com, Google Video and iTunes also perform video searches, but these services are limited to whatever is hosted on their respective servers. Video searches are currently limited to looking up
words that appear in a video's title text, or in descriptions or information embedded in a video file in the form of "metadata" or "tags," while a few TV shows include closed
captioning data that is searchable in some cases. The technology for searching actual words used in video exists, but is in its infancy and isn't widely deployed yet. AOL Video Search is powered by
Truveo.com and Singingfish.com, the company's acquired video search companies. It displays previous searches in a left-hand column that can be saved to an AOL playlist. Yahoo Video Search displays
results in a grid of images, but it doesn't show advertisements on its search and results page, unlike AOL. Blinkx TV has a simple, customizable interface, but its results weren't as accurate as AOL
and Yahoo.
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