Video Search Round Up

The video search sector is becoming a crowded place with a number of new entrants or post-stealth companies making their presence felt.

Blinkx, a rollout from Cambridge, UK based intelligent agent search company, Autonomy, is by now the old man on the block. Blinkx basically index your content according to a pre set schema and have made some impact in aggregating metadata, although their rankings, according to Alexa, seem to be pretty poor to date.

Dabble has recently come to prominence (although doing a Google and claiming to be still in 'beta'); it attempts to combine community features with a search function and, along with the other video search site, features the de rigeur-by now upload capability. Indeed, Dabble seems to be closer to an upload site such as Youtube than the other services featured here.

Singingfish is also an old timer and a lot more mature in its approach, enabling some serious search functionality by filtering results. You can submit to the service here.

Pixsy is the new kid on the block (or should that be blog..) with its hybrid image/video search capability.

Some of the existing players have also jumped on the bandwagon, everyone is aware of Google Video, but also available is the video search engine on the grandaddy of them all, AltaVista. You can submit your service here.

One of my major gripes is that it's difficult to submit content from third party hosted sites and systems to all of these services apart from Altavista and Singingfish.

All of them are pretty dumb - you have to submit to them for them to work (although I suspect that AltaVista does some web indexing).

But perhaps more worrying is the fact that none of these services seem to feature any advertising, let alone be in a position to make money at the moment. Let the landgrab begin.

Let me know if there are any other engines that I've missed out...

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