Truveo: the little video search engine that could

Update: Truveo was acquired by AOL.

A few days ago, Truveo went quietly out of stealth. It did not get noticed immediately because of two major news “sandwiching” its release: Skype/eBay and Google BlogSearch. However the buzz has been growing since then, and the initial feedback is pretty positive. Yes, the coverage is still to be improved and the index is being backfilled as we speak, but on a very large set of queries, Truveo returns the most relevant/freshest results. Just try “hurricane rita” on Truveo, Google & Yahoo.

Truveo was founded 2 years ago by my friends Tim and Adam – which is partly why I made a small angel investment in the company. Anticipating the growing importance of online videos in news, sports, entertainment, etc., they decided to focus on one thing: providing the freshest and most comprehensive index of high quality videos found on the Internet.

The main issue in locating videos on web sites is that they are very often hidden beyond popups, a lot of scripting and style sheets and outside of the “crawlable” space of a web site. Truveo therefore developed a unique 2–step mechanism that involves a standard crawler figuring out which sites might contain videos, and a specific “visual crawler” that analyzes web sites by loading all files, scripts, etc. in an instrumented server-side equivalent of an HTML browser, and simulating user interactions in order to locate video player code – and videos.

Once a new video is located, it is stored in the Truveo index alongside all metadata and surrounding descriptive information that can be extracted. And depending on the type of web site, a crawling policy will be established – assessing how often the bots will revisit it. Popular news sites will therefore be visited extremely regularly.

After results of a search are displayed, clicking on a video replays it in its original context, i.e in the original web site window, surrounded by the original ads, etc. Premium content, requiring a specific license or subscription, will be flagged as such (or can be filtered out). Vloggers will be able to register their feed here (scroll down 2 screens), if expressed in RSS 2.0 or Media RSS formats.

So go for a ride, and let the team know what you think.

More:

• CNET.com: Start-up Truveo enters video search field
• TechNewsWorld: Truveo Challenges Video Search Players
• TechCrunch: Truveo - Video Search
• SearchViews: Truveo Video Search - Bigger + Badder
• TechnologyReview.com: Vying to be Captain Video

Tag: truveo