Quick analysis of image and video search engines

I’ve been increasingly interested in the market for video and image search but since there have been so many players, I’ve never been quite clear as to who offers the best solution. My desire to test the engines came about after an interview with Chase Norlin, CEO of Pixsy, a company that has a white label image and video search tool.

I searched just two terms. “Zapruder,” the man who filmed the famous Kennedy assassination footage, and also “Lindsay Lohan” solely because Chase Norlin joked that’s all anybody wanted to watch on Pixsy. In general, the overwhelming majority of search results were valid except where noted.

Image Search

Video Search

Norlin appeared cavalier about how the public uses video search, saying, “Relevance doesn’t matter, it has to do with being entertained.” Not the smartest thing for a CEO of a search engine to be saying. I guess when you deliver such poor results compared to your competitors, you have to think of some defense to hide behind.

But Norlin may have some valid reasoning. Video is linear. It can’t be scanned like text results. Plus, often people look to video as entertainment, not necessarily for information like people do with text. On the other hand, if Norlin’s only basis for understanding the video search market is his own site’s statistics then he doesn’t have a clear picture. Of course people are going to watch the Lindsay Lohan video if that’s all you’re going to give them.

There’s so much to discuss in this space, but I just wanted to open up the discussion with an initial look at some search results.

What do you think? Do people search for video like they do text? What about when they search for pictures? Also, do you search for video and if you do what kinds of things are you looking for?

UPDATE: NewTeeVee has a review of some new video tools and the blog turned me on to a new video search player, Ulinkx, which has the same white labeled model as Pixsy, although they only offer video search and not image search. Still, only a year old, and they had mixed results for video search (“Zapruder” – 32, “Lindsay Lohan” – 1513).

UPDATE 2: Another interesting company, Vodium, has a B2B video publishing platform for businesses that want to record conferences, webcasts, and other kinds of discussions. The audio is translated to text and your personal database is indexable. This sounds really good, but my question is can they highlight certain valuable portions? That would be a great benefit. More information and an audio interview can be found here.

UPDATE 3 (5/17/07): Not a surprise, but Google will start now blending it’s video search results from YouTube and Google Video with video from other locations as well. But they will spotlight its own video prominently in search results causing most of us to want to post all our video content on either Google Video or YouTube.