Truveo: A Better Way to Find Video

I've been having fun trying out the new version of Truveo, the video search engine owned by AOL. It competes with video search sites such as Google Video, Yahoo Video, and Blinkx.tv--and, inevitably, YouTube, even though YouTube's a repository for video, not a search engine.

Truveo's new version has a number of things going for it. Such as...

Timeliness. The Truveo folks told me that their engine finds new content on the Web quickly, and pushes it to the top of search results. And in my experimentations, that seemed to be true. For instance, when I searched for videos about the president's daughter, Jenna Bush, Truveo mostly came up with ones about today's news that she's become engaged. Google Video skewed towards older stuff, and Yahoo Video's first result is about a different Jenna altogether.

It skews towards legit stuff. I guess that can be considered a pro or a con--and it makes sense considering this site is owned by Time Warner--but if you do a search for, say, Daily Show, you'll mostly get video that's sanctioned by copyright owners (including both free stuff and for-pay downloads), not pirated clips. Unauthorized clips on YouTube and elsewhere are there in the results, but they're not as prominent.

It goes wide. Not everything is available on YouTube. Actually, there's video all over the Net, and Truveo finds a lot of it at sites large and small. (At the moment, though, it's not finding PC World's video section--we're working on fixing that.)

You can often watch videos without leaving Truveo. If the site where a video's hosted allows it, Truveo embeds the video in its own page. If not, you're forced to click one more time to get to the site with the video. (Truveo will also give you a snippet of HTML that lets you embed the videos it finds on your own site, although I'm not entirely sure why you'd use Truveo's embed option instead of the one at the originating site.)

It divvies stuff up into categories. Tabs across the top of the page let you browse News, Sports, Music, and other topics; there's a tab for TV Shows, although it doesn't let you navigate to all the shows you can get to on Truveo.

I'm still deciding how I feel about Truveo's user interface, which divides up tabbed pages and search results into lots and lots of boxes. I did a search for "Batman," for instance, and got the following subsections:

Top Viewed
Most Viewed Now
Most Viewed Today
Most Viewed This Week
Most Viewed This Month
Most Viewed of All Time
Highest Rated
Most Recent
Most Relevant
Videos For Sale
Featured Channels: Veoh
Featured Channels: Blip.tv
Featured Channels: iFilm
More Channels, with 26 links
Featured Categories: Entertainment
Featured Categories: Home Video
Featured Categories: Comedy
More Categories, with 21 links
Featured Tags: Batman
Featured Tags: Dark
Featured Tags: Knight
More Tags, with 26 links

Whew. That's a lot of choice--arguably too much choice. And it's kinda confusing--at least to me--that videos sometimes show up in more than one subsection. (Why Truveo's results for "Batman" have one section for "Dark" and one for "Knight," with the same videos, I don't know.)

Overall, though, I like Truveo. If the goal of a video search engine is to lead you quickly to stuff you're interested in and might otherwise not know about, it works better than any competitor I've tried.

And hey, let's end with a video I found--a user review of a cool magazine over at ExpoTV.com:

Comments

And the good news is that they have 45,000 plus porn vids from PornoTube -- how nice just what we need more of on the net.

Mike

mbtins

August 17, 2007

9:58 AM PT