If Carol Bartz’s remarks about "pretty search" (made during the Yahoo Investor Day event) left you scratching your head, her company’s acted quickly to clear up the confusion.  Today, Yahoo updated its image and video search homepages so that trending terms are represented with rows of pictures.

Online video is an increasingly populur medium from both users’ standpoints and business’ alike. When done right, it can be a great way to increase engagement and spread brand awareness. It can also be used for search engine optimization purposes. I’m sure you’ve noticed videos come up in the blended search results for many queries.

WebProNews fired a few questions at Benjamin Wayne, CEO of Fliqz, a Video hosting firm to see if he had some good tips to offer our readers. The following is the product of our Q&A.

Hulu has a new captions search feature available via Hulu Labs. The feature allows Hulu users to search the captions of videos across hundreds of different shows. Show and video pages now have a "Captions" tab, and search can be found there.

There was an interesting session on online video at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East, which WebProNews attended. The session was called "Video Search Marketing Beyond YouTube". The following tips come from a combination of presentations from that session from speakers: William Leake of Apogee Search, John McWeeny of TurnHere, and Eric Papczun of Performics.

As you may know, Google’s Matt Cutts frequently answers user questions by posting videos to the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel, and the latest one he tackled has to do with videos ranking for universal search on Google. Here is the question that Cutts received:

YouTube has been touted by its employees as the "2nd largest search engine." With that, it makes sense that the site would place its search feature a little more in the spotlight.

YouTube has tweaked its masthead to eliminate some clutter and do some "housecleaning," as Product Manager Shiva Rajaraman puts it.

A little over a month ago, a new real time search engine entered the scene. It was called Collecta, and while still in Beta, they have announced some big improvements today.

AOL’s Truveo, which touts itself as the 2nd largest video search engine both in the US and worldwide, has relaunched its site for 17 countries. The company says the update makes it easier than ever to find video on the web.

VideoSurf is a video search engine I’ve written about in the past. Today, the company unveiled its latest release.

WebProNews received an email from them, and a spokesperson tells us, "VideoSurf is taking video search to the next level." He mentioned the following highlights:

Video ZEO firm EveryZing has closed an $8.25 Million round of funding from its existing investors, which include Fairhaven Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners and BBN Technologies. EveryZing has also added GE and NBC Universal’s Peacock Equity Fund as an investor.

EveryZing will also be deploying its universal search and publishing solutions across a number of NBCU’s Internet properties. The goal is to improve the video search experience for some major media sites.

Google held its annual stockholders’ meeting yesterday evening and to accompany that Co-founder Sergey Brin decided to re-share the 2008 Founders’ Letter, which was originally published on Google’s Investor Relations site. Brin says they wanted to make this more widely available so they posted it on the Official Google Blog.

Video SEO firm EveryZing has launched what it’s referring to as "the Internet’s first cloud-based metadata service" called MediaCloud. As online video plays a bigger role in marketing, lots of businesses are looking for better ways to get their videos found.

January marked the first operational month for video search engine OVGuide as a profit-making entity. Now it has received $5 million in funding from Baroda Ventures.

Last week, Google announced the end of some of its services, and among them was the ability for users to upload videos to Google Video. They said they would be refocusing their attention on building a more comprehensive video search engine, and why not? They’ve already got YouTube.

YouTube has a couple of new things going on worth noting. First off, if you nave not noticed by now, embedded YouTube videos now carry a search box at the top. This only appears when you mouseover the top portion of the video, and disappears when you move away.

Now that we are in December, the final month of the year, I thought it would be fun to go back through our archives and take a look at some of the highlights of different sectors of our industry, and reflect on everything that has happened over the year 2008. January seems so long ago. So much has happened.

Earlier this year, YouTube rolled out YouTube Insight, an analytics program for videos that let users get a look into where and by whom videos were posted. They have launched a new feature of that service today, which allows you to actually pinpoint the specific parts of videos that get viewed the most. A post on the Official Google Blog explains:

Google has started integrating audio indexing or "GAudi" (Google Audio Indexing) into video search. The company hopes to eventually apply it to all YouTube videos, but so far it is only limited to a narrow selection. The experiment began as an iGoogle gadget for political videos, but has now become a Google Labs project, though it is still only being applied to the "Politicians" channel of YouTube.

Word on the street is that video search is about to get a huge upgrade, courtesy of a new site called VideoSurf. Video search has been a tough nut to crack for even the likes of Google, with relevancy problems plaguing pretty much every video search engine around.

Google will make use of an extension to the Sitemaps protocol to do a better job of indexing the videos people publish.

I like Blinkx – the video search engine stays busy, thereby giving us something to write about.  And today, the video search engine gave evidence that it has been very busy – Blinkx announced 28 new media partnerships.

If, as Compete suggests, 20 million visitors is the "magical mark" indicating a website has officially arrived as a dominant force – most recent additions to this exclusive club include Digg.com and Facebook – then the folks behind AOL’s Truveo video search engine must have exchanged their old wands for Super Deluxe models.