16 December 2004 | Author: Andrew Girdwood Head of Strategy

Video search coming next

In what feels like a sneak peak into 2005 Yahoo have released a beta version of their video search.

Yahoo! have mixed both kinds of networking to get their impressive new video search online. Movie files and equivalents such as Flash animation are notoriously search engine unfriendly. Search engine spiders struggle to even find these files, as they're often tucked behind JavaScript detection scripts, let alone read and make sense of them. Yahoo's turned to its vast network of contacts and providers to ask about their libraries of multimedia.

"That's exactly why we've talking to a lot of our existing media partners, many of whom have sizeable video assets which have yet to be indexed." writes Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! Search.

Jeremy Zawodny, a respected blog and RSS guru, and the Yahoo! Search team have turned to the popular RSS technology for the video search. Specially encoded RSS feeds can be used to enclose meta data about the movie file and Yahoo!'s video search is primed to examine these enclosures for keywords.

The Video Search preview is currently live on http://video.search.yahoo.com / . Yahoo! have asked for feedback and there's a contact link on the page. They've also said to be kind as their new search product is only in beta.

AOL bought the multimedia search engine Singing Fish in 2004 but the American ISP remains closely associated with Google. Google's desktop search indexes AOL instant messages for example. Although Google is the most successful engine at indexing Flash files we're yet to see any significant multimedia contributions from the world's leading search engine.

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