• The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, October 30, 2008 11:45 AM

Most search engines rely on publishers of Web video to provide terms that make their videos searchable. Publishers will usually apply "metatags" to videos, such as "olympics," "Jon Stewart," or "Dishwasher repair" so they can be found. But not all publishers take this step, while others intentionally mislabel their videos in order to maximize hits. So some search engines are now debuting new, better ways to search videos.

For example, VideoSurf is using technology that can search the actual content of the video, and YouTube is developing speech-recognition technology that can be used to search the actual words spoken in a video. Other search engines are supplementing traditional search technology by gathering additional details about videos, such as viewer ratings or number of times they've been viewed.

There are obvious incentives for finding new ways to search video. In the U.S. alone, more than 11 billion clips were viewed online in July, according to comScore. That's up from nine billion videos in July 2007.

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