A trip to SingingFish now ends up at AOL Video Search. The site has a broad collection of videos available for viewing, or in the case of some branded properties for purchase.

Going to Truveo now means going to SearchVideo. The functionality remains the same. This AOL-run property serves as an aggregator and search of multiple online video sources.

Videos from a host of sources, from MySpace to iFilm to YouTube, can be tapped from SearchVideo’s interface. It also offers several filtering options with choices like cost, quality, and format for the searcher to apply.

A substantial difference between AOL Video and SearchVideo exists. ResourceShelf pointed out that SearchVideo does not contain advertising. The more brand-powered, commerce-oriented AOL Video does.

Search results for both properties appear to be handled by a single technology. A search for “soccer” on both sites returned identical first-page results. It’s likely that the Truveo/SearchVideo algorithms won out here.

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AOL’s November 2005 trial of its Hi-Q video format demonstrated how the company could deliver video content at a high level of quality. When AOL debuts its newest Video Search this week, Hi-Q will be part of that release.

The company also promised in a statement a more streamlined presentation of search results from video search, along with continual refinement of the relevancy and recency of videos returned to queries.

AOL picked up one key piece of these changes, the Truveo search engine, in December 2005. Truveo debuted only three months before AOL bought it for the unique visual crawling technology its engineers created. AOL may be the most advanced video search site today because of it.

The updated AOL video search site will have plenty of content. They will add Truveo’s 1.8 million indexed videos to the 20,000-plus videos from AOL’s archives and the 2.5 million videos contained in its Singingfish search engine.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

“Innovative short-form content from AtomFilms meets the needs of today’s consumers, who demand bursts of quality entertainment that fit into busy schedules,” said Scott Roesch, Vice President and General Manager of AtomFilms. “These new distribution agreements with industry leading sites will make AtomFilms’ entertainment available to an even wider audience.”

An industry pioneer and leader since 1999, AtomFilms has seen its audience increase 174 percent in the past year as broadband continues to drive more consumption of video content online. This growth in traffic has expanded opportunities for AtomFilms’ world-class advertising clients, which currently include Honda, Mountain Dew, Schick and many more leading brands.

“Consumer interest in online video is exploding and it is one of our highest priorities to provide consumers with a top-notch and entertaining video experience on our AOL.com portal as well as make it easy for consumers to find and discover interesting video content from across the Web,” said Jim Bankoff, Executive Vice President, Programming and Products, AOL. “With its extensive library of short films and animation, AtomFilms is one of the leaders in this industry and we are pleased to be working with them.”

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Last month, AOL announced a deal with Reuters to provide news video content for SingingFish, adding a huge amount of video submitted from all over the world. This month, AOL signed up 10 new partners. Atom-Films, CBSNews.com, Hollywood.com, Like Television, ManiaTV.com, MarketWatch, and the O Network are among the new playmates, according to this Cnet article.

AOL’s association with Time Warner gives it a distinct automatic advantage in the video world. CNN is already a part of the AOL mix of content providers, and with the decades of film content provided by Warner Brothers, AOL will surely have a leg up in this sector of the search world, even if other multimedia search engines have agreements with some of the same content providers.

SingingFish was acquired by AOL in 2003 and is one of the oldest multimedia search engines on the net.

The onslaught of multimedia content search providers continues to light up the search world with steep competition. Yahoo and Google are among other major players vying for kingship.

Also with the launch of the BitTorrent search engine , it should be an interesting battle to see who becomes king of the digital hill.

SingingFish handles over 200 million video and audio searches every month and has grown in popularity by 100% over the past year. AOL is one of the largest streamers on the Net with an on-demand archive of over 10,000 downloadable audio/video offerings.

Azhar Rafee, Executive Vice President, Reuters Consumer Service, said, “with broadband expected to be in more homes than cable and satellite within five years, the use of video over IP will continue to rocket. The challenge for news programmers is to make it easier for people to get straight to the video they want to see. Search has a key role to play here as it has become one of the most common ways that people access online content.”

Google Makes Video Search Personal

Editor’s Note: What do you think of Google Video Search? Do you think their request for personal videos can give them a more robust engine? Discuss at WebProWorld.

The idea was stated by Page, who said, “In the next few days, we’re actually going to start taking video submissions from people, and we’re not quite sure what we’re going to get, but we decided we’d try this experiment.” Because of this statement, many feel Google is on its way to becoming a major player or host in the growing method of video blogging called vlogging.

They also feel Google Video’s submission service will do for vlogging as Google’s purchase of Blogger.com did for normal, text-style blogging. Are they jumping the gun? Only time will tell.

However, because of Google Video’s apparent impotence when compared to Yahoo Video Search and the AOL-owned SingingFish, perhaps Google is doing this merely to improve their product and not to revolutionize the blogging medium again.

Currently, Google Video only searches for the closed caption text of video provided by their partners, which consist of:

PBS
C-SPAN
Fox News
C-SPAN2

and these San Francisco Bay Area stations

ABC (KGO)
NBC (KNTV)
KQED
KRON

Whereas, Yahoo Video and SingingFish search open servers to provide their content.

By requesting submissions, Google Video can bolster its search index, while offering users unique content with which to query. This does raise another question, however:

Why would someone want to search for someone else’s personal video, unless it has some notoriety to it (Star Wars Kid, Paris Hilton)? Do searchers really want to see other people’s self-indulgent rants? Especially when they can read the same thing on a text blog?

Although, on the WebmasterWorld forums, Hester provides a different point of view by saying:

Video is naturally one of many future directions for the web. On the BBC site (sorry for the duplicate entry, there were no posts when I tried to start a new one) there’s a link about how the tsunami disaster started up a sudden need for videos. When bandwidth is irrelevant and storage capacities almost infinite, won’t we all want to add videos to our sites? Especially if everyone else has them. Google are just getting in there early.

This point is furthered on the same forum by Michael Heraghty, who says:

A fascinating development. This takes us closer to the kind of media technologies that, twenty years ago, only existed in science fiction imaginings.

As for why Google chose to experiment with video blogs, rather than video clips — I wonder if it’s to get around copyright issues?

Another point of view is offered by Loren of SearchEngineJournal, who says:

If Google were to enter video blogging, it would be the perfect connector of the otherwise decentralized worlds of Picasa (Google’s photo sharing technology), GMail Storage (video memory needs to be stored somewhere), Google Video, and Blogger. Google Video currently only indexes the transcripts of certain Google partners broadcasts (and then links to those videos) but should be offering true video search soon once broadcasting rights are ironed out.

Whatever Google Video’s motivation is, the request for content has been made. What’s next is to wait and see how the public reacts to this request. Will they inundate Google with submissions or will this fall quietly to they wayside? A lot of it all probably depends on the where the popularity of vlogging goes.

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