AOL Buys Video Search Firm

Eric Newman writes "TheStreet.com is reporting that America Online has purchased Truveo.com. From the article: 'Truveo has a proprietary technology called visual crawling that lets it automatically discover video files on Web pages, enabling customers to see updated information on news, sports and entertainment. The acquisition, which closed Dec. 21, was AOL's fifth last year. News of the deal wasn't released until Tuesday. Terms were not disclosed.' Note that the deal closed the same week that Google bought a 5% stake in AOL, in part to collaborate on video technology."

Comments

Re:How?

[Otter]

Reading Truveo's site, it looks like a) it gets all its metadata from the context in which it's found, not from examining the video itself and b) their real accomplishment is being able to fish through the different layers behind which most news sites put their video. It doesn't sound super-imprressive to me, but AOL seems to disagree.

As for your question -- presumably you could pipe the audio portion to a speech-to-text tool and parse that, no?

Re:How?

[Big_Al_B]

The simple technical solution is to embed meta-data in tags.

Some of that can be automatically populated, such as creation date, length and file type. Some has to be manually added, such as title, rating, or genre.

Re:How?

[MoonFog]

So it basically does for videos what Google image search does for images if I've understood this correctly? Not that there's anything wrong with that, it works alright with Google images so far.