The video search engine Truveo didn’t spend very much time as a stand-alone company, as AOL came calling with a briefcase full of money and left with the business in hand.

By purchasing video search startup Truveo, AOL may have given its pal at Google a little kick in the ribs after making off with $1 billion of their investment.

Bambi Francisco believes that Truveo (acquired today by AOL) is a better video search technology than Google Video.

New approach to video search utilizes “visual crawling” to find video the same way a casual Web surfer would.