Pixsy’s technology crawls the Web hourly, aggregating and categorizing video and image results. The Veoh deal includes stand-alone fees and revenue sharing. Veoh can still work with other video search partners, but Pixsy is its exclusive image provider.

Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin told Media Post," We’re in the business of helping sites like Veoh profit from image and video search, the fastest-growing search verticals. We’re getting these sites in the search business, which everyone understands and knows how to monetize."

Last month Veoh announced that several media, entertainment and finance industries had joined its team of investors. They included Goldman Sachs, FireFly3 and Jonathan Dolgen. Veoh’s Series C funding closed in August 2007, and it received $25 million in financing.

Veoh is currently involved in a suit against Universal Music Group to reinforce its rights as copyright compliant company under the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Veoh’s user base reached 18 million unique users in August 2007, up from 4.4 million users when the site launched in February 2007.

StarHabit launched from Pixsy this morning. The company touted the new site as enabling StarHabit users to search for the latest, freshest celebrity content online.

A statement from Pixsy described what StarHabit can do:

The new site will pull content and aggregate it from a variety of sources, like GalleryOfTheAbsurd.com, TMZ.com, PinkIsTheNewBlog.com, E!Online, PerezHilton, StarPulse, HollywoodTuna, Defamer, TheSuperficial, GoFugYourself, Anorak, Entertainment Weekly, Hollywood.com, and many more.

Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin told Reuters, “If you look at all these popular celebrity blogs, you can tell that people are addicted to this stuff. If a Mel Gibson thing would have happened while StarHabit was operational, we would have had that news within minutes.”

With StarHabit serving to demonstrate the power of Pixsy’s media search platform, Norlin also noted how his product could benefit a site publisher that licenses it. “It creates new ad inventory instead of cannibalizing what’s already out there,” Norlin said. “Anyone can become a mini-YouTube with Pixsy.”

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Pixsy‘s maiden voyage was last July, but due to limited partnerships and a reliance on XML, it couldn’t deliver on its promise. Founded by four pedigree engineers hailing from Microsoft, Sony, InfoSpace, and Corbis, the AJAX-based website has been reconfigured to move beyond XML, and has procured partnerships with The New York Times, BBC, YouTube, and Business Week among others.

The idea is to “explore the web visually” as Pixsy’s search engine claims to combine freshness and relevancy – and only returns visual results with a listed source.

“Anywhere there’s an RSS feed, we consume it, extract an image…and make it searchable,” said Chase Norlin, founder of the company.

Image search has been on a serious upswing over the past year as vertical search services become popular among more sophisticated surfers. Still, Google has had issues with publishers over indexing copyrighted material. Pixsy has covered that base, in large part, due to its partnerships. But, it remains to be seen how publishers outside that partnership will react.

The site is supported by contextual pay-per-click advertising and its partnerships, and has future plans for licensing to other companies. The partnerships it already has, like with The New York Times and the BBC, provide a very interesting photojournalism experience with the latest photos from those publications and the ability to click and find the articles associated with them. That’s one aspect that makes this service stand out among other image and video search engines.

However, where it already has trouble is in relevancy. A search for Paris Hilton, for example, brought up few (or none) images of her on the first page. Instead, they were photos of other people, or a little white dog (a Bichon Frise?) written about in a Spanish blog post that mentions Paris Hilton. (Curiously, a subsequent search was without this problem).

Pixsy also seems to have an issue with Firefox. When tabbing two separate photo searches, leaving the first to go to the second, and then returning to the first (are you lost?), the first tab takes on the subject of the second one and you’ve lost the original. For example: leave Paris Hilton tab for Jessica Simpson tab, return to Paris Hilton tab and click the next page and its now Jessica Simpson.

Finding images seems very dependent upon what is current in the feeds that mention the keywords, and as someone else pointed out, searching for adult film stars or nude models may bring back very irrelevant photographs of flowers – along side an “error getting Looksmart ads.”

These are some issues the crew at Pixsy will have to work out or users will find little use for it. They have some big name partnerships, but aren’t delivering the goods 100% of the time. And it is unclear how Pixsy plans to avoid RSS spam, if a little keyword trickery can fool it at times.

Maybe some more tweaking will precede a third launch, and that will be the charm for Pixsy.com.

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For example, visitors can click a logo of the New York Times on the Web on Pixsy.com to see a collection of the publisher’s latest photos, which are then linked to news stories on the publisher’s Web site. People can also type in the search box, “George Clooney,” to see photos of the Academy Award-winning actor, linked to all the latest stories about him.

It will be interesting to see reaction. Google has already faced a law suit because of its indexing of images. Smaller search engines seem to be an even bigger target for publishers not happy with having their content stored elsewhere.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

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With that in mind, allow WPN to introduce Pixsy.com, a search engine dedicated to finding images located at the various blogs, social networks, and other random sites that produce unique content. Pixsy’s goal is to produce images other engines don’t find and that’s why the developers limit their search to the more personal aspect of the web.

Pixsy does not use spiders to populate their index, instead they seem to favor human editors who can locate these sites that produce unique content on a regular basis. According to Pixsy, The result: photos not found anywhere else on the web.

Pixsy’s search results are presented similar to other image searches: images with the originating URL appearing underneath the image. When a result image is clicked, users are taken to a page that features the image link, the originating page link and a representation of the site it was found on. Pixsy also uses image-based contextual ads, which are normally related to the query.

All in all, this is a very effective attempt at creating an image search engine that’s separate from the Big 3. Judging by a couple of queries I performed, Pixsy seems to have a respectable image index. Considering how quickly content is added to the sections of the web Pixsy searches, there should be enough images to keep Pixsy going indefinitely.

Thanks to Gary Price for the heads-up.

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.