Chris Sherman at Search Engine Land has a really good article about a new video search service called VideoSurf. This could be the start of something really interesting, because as we are well aware, video search is hopelessly attached to meta tags, keywords and descriptions, which often put out very irrelevant search results. Image recognition of pictures is hard enough, and with videos, there’s more to look at along with sound.

VideoSurf takes a different approach, using everything that’s been done before along with their own very advanced (and resource-burning) system that analyzes the sound and videos to find patterns that help them recognize who is present or what is going on.

VideoSurf takes into account the most unique parts of a video–the parts that reveal the greatest range of possibilities for a searcher. It shows you these when you search and also provides a row of thumbnails that point to the people or images seen most associated with that search word. For instance, if you do a search for “Tropic Thunder,” you’ll see a row of pictures featuring Robert Downey, Jr., Tom Cruise, Ben Stiller, and Jack Black.

Also, other actors or images associated with that search will appear because they are connected in a video. If you do a search for Morgan Freeman, it’s very likely that Ashley Judd’s picture will show up.

Additionally, there are other ways to aggregate content by site and category.

Just a start, and I haven’t taken a look at it personally (they haven’t sent my invite), but it looks pretty cool.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 5:09 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.