"As Firefox hit 1B downloads last week, the VideoSurf extension brings sophisticated video search technology to what has become one of the most ubiquitous browsers available," a spokesperson for VideoSurf tells WebProNews.

Although Twitter has been cracking down on the posting of malicious URLs, they probably can’t catch them all, and this could be good for that reason alone. The following video shows how it works. 

The add-on does more than just display videos on Twitter though. It also adds to the user’s experience in Google search results. Video results will display visual summaries and related videos will appear on the page. VideoSurf pulls videos from a variety of video sources.

With all of the add-on’s video displays, you can hover over the videos and they will begin to play, allowing for a similar preview experience to what Bing offers in its video search (you know the one that got people talking about watching porn at work when Bing first launched).

With the add-on installed, you also get some extra stuff when you visit YouTube, including results from other video sources beyond YouTube. You also get the visual summaries that YouTube doesn’t offer on its own.

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:

- Improved search results – new methods to weed out irrelevant videos, spam and misleading thumbnails (did you know that 20% of all videos on the Web are spam?)

- People in the Spotlight – be entertained with videos of the most popular personalities on the Web, and discover related videos

- Homepage re-design that lets you discover videos that are related to what the world is buzzing about on Twitter, Google, etc.

That relevancy is probably the thing that people care most about when it comes to video search. Frankly it’s been an issue that has plagued video search in general.

"Search is what we do here," says  Margo Brockman on the VideoSurf blog.  It’s what we have a team of world renowned mathematicians constantly iterating on and tirelessly working to improve.  Our goal is always the same: better, more relevant results for your searches and a faster way to connect you to the videos you want to watch. 

The new release of VideoSurf is also designed to "attack" spam. The company says that over 20% of videos on the web are spam, and they have responded to this by improving the way they use their vision technology to automatically detect spam videos and algorithmically devalue them in their rankings before they make it onto the results page.

"Because other video sites are unable to see the video content, they can’t know that their users are being misled," explains Margo. "VideoSurf however, is able visually identify the problem and boost the video down in our search rankings automatically. We even take it a step further. If we need to show this video in our search results, VideoSurf is able to automatically correct the inaccurate thumbnail so that the leading thumbnail we show is more representative of what the video is actually about (all this in addition to showing you all the most important scenes in our Visual Summary)."

Margo provides the following example screenshot with a comparison between YouTube and VideoSurf results:

Youtube:

 VideoSurf:

 Duplicate videos often plague video search, and VideoSurf has this under control too. The company’s "Computer Vision technology" recognizes duplicate videos and groups them together to improve relevancy and save the user time.

"Other video site’s deduplication technology relies on matching up titles and start/stop times," explains Margo. "It’s not their fault; that’s all they have to work with. However, our ability to see inside videos lets us take this a step further. VideoSurf is able to identify each video’s unique visual DNA and match it against others in the index."

Features of VideoSurf’s new homepage include a hot searches feature, which pulls the most searched for terms across the web, the people in the spotlight feature, which is a collection of the most searched for people on the web, which if I understand correctly is in real time, and the Watchboxes feature, which appears to just be a featured videos section.

Have you tried the new VideoSurf yet? If so, let us know what you think of it.

Perhaps it was the hype of video search engine VideoSurf (I’m still awaiting my invitation on that btw) that got this kicked into gear. Those who have had a chance to use that seem to think quite highly of it. Basically, it uses visuals throughout the videos to identify relevant results. Whether or not a certain company will try to acquire VideoSurf down the road remains to be seen (but you can imagine what it would be like if they did…eh? eh?).

But that’s neither here nor there. Google’s dealing with audio right now and seems to be making strides, though it is still far from perfect. The transition (or translation, depending on how you want to look at it) from audio to text is a bit rocky as some excerpts from this Barack obama speech illustrate:

For example, "sex" is really "since" (I wonder how it would pick up Tiki Barber’s recent slip [may contain unsuitable language]). That’s why the project is in Google Labs though. It’s not an official release, and it will likely be improved upon. Frederic Lardinois Read Write Web suggests some additional improvements:

It would be extremely useful, for example, to be able to sort videos by date. Right now, they are always sorted by relevance, though in this fast-paced political season, it is often more important to know when somebody last used a certain phrase.

Also, while the variation on the YouTube video player Google uses here is well suited for this task, you cannot embed the videos on your own site. All you get is a link to the video on the Audi Indexing site.

The nice part about the interface is that you can jump directly to certain parts of the video based on the search results. As you can see in the above image, there are play buttons next to each one.

Despite the current kinks in the project, it is evident that video search on the whole is on the way up in terms of usefulness. I just wonder how long it will be before video and image search produce just as relevant results as regular text search. It might be a while before it gets to that point, but the light at the end of the tunnel seems a little closer these days.

Update: I have now received my invitation for VideoSurf. I’ll have to do some experimenting with it.

Even YouTube, what many average users would consider to be the premiere site for searching videos, has problems nailing down relevant results sometimes. The main issue with video search (along with image search) has been the fact that the search engines generally use text associated with the videos to come up with results, whether that be file names, titles or surrounding text on the video’s page.

There are exceptions to this like blinkx and EveryZing as Chris Sherman at Search Engine Land notes, that take video search a bit further with speech to text conversion, but they’re still a ways off from the bulls-eye. Sherman got a peak at VideoSurf (presumably at TechCrunch 50 where it is being displayed), and is very impressed with what he has seen.  VideoSurf actually gets into the videos themselves on a frame by frame basis.

At this point, VideoSurf is only available to the public on an invitation-only basis, although you can request an invitation. I haven’t heard back yet on mine.

Sherman is so impressed, in fact, that he seems almost certain that VideoSurf will be bought by one of the big search players. If he’s right, and VideoSurf is as impressive as he lets on, this could either push Google even further up the charts of search dominance, or give Yahoo! or Microsoft a little firepower to at least stay in the search picture a while longer. Joanne Bradford says that Yahoo!’s best days are still ahead. Maybe she knows something we don’t. I’m just anxious to see whether or not VideoSurf is really worth its hype.