AOL Buys Video Search Firm

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday January 10, 2006 @04:47AM from the internet-is-for-porn dept.

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."

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How? by tacokill · 2006-01-10 05:02 · Score: 3, Interesting

How, excatly, does this thing work? I am not an expert in search technologies but one thing that jumps out at me is this:

How do you index videos and put context around them?

Does it parse the language that is being spoken? Does it read the subtitles? For example, if I snip a 1 minute story on the G-7 summit from CNN, how do you know what the story is about if I don't tell you? To my knowledge, there is no sophisticated technology solution for this aside from reading the subtitles and indexing that.

I've thought about this alot. Everyone and their dog seems to be coming out with a video search engine of somekind and not a single implementation has explained how they are going to do the indexing.

I suppose they could take the Yahoo approach and view/sort each video that is submitted. But that is not a realistic long term solution, IMHO.
1. Re:How? by Anonymous Coward · 2006-01-10 05:23 · Score: 0, Interesting
  
  I expect what they really have is a US patent monopoly on what amounts to the very idea* of trawling for video content. It'll be "proprietary" because they own a patent on doing it. So it's probably ammo for AOL to use against google video searching. I could be entirely wrong about Truveo, but I'm usually not. :-(
  
  (* a patent lawyer will try to tell you "patents only cover implementations of ideas, not the ideas themselves" - but quite visibly in the software industry that's effectively not the case)
2. Re:How? by Otter · 2006-01-10 05:38 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  So it basically does for videos what Google image search does for images if I've understood this correctly?
  If I understood the Truveo site correctly -- yeah, it's similar to Google image search except with a supposedly better crawler.
  
  --
  What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I tried visual crawling once by digitaldc · 2006-01-10 05:04 · Score: 3, Interesting

but I only saw a slow-moving floor.

But seriously folks, the search engine works rather well. Its interesting to note that the ads on truveo are by google, and http://video.google.com/ is another viable alternative.

Even though we are just getting started, we have already indexed an extensive collection of web video that you will not find in any other search engine.
Google will soon take care of that.

--
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
yawn... wake me up when its something new by skiingyac · 2006-01-10 05:21 · Score: 2, Interesting

truveo.com is basically google image but for video... Take google's image search crawler logic, replace jpg with mpg (or rather wmv or flash...) and voila. explain why truveo.com is so awesome?