Truveo, which was acquired by AOL in early 2006, is considered to be one of the best video search engines on the Internet. It looks beyond metadata attached to the video file itself and explores the content on the website around the video - resulting in more data to index and better search results.
The traffic figures support this. Comscore reports that the site has 40 million monthly unique visitors and is growing at about a 50%/month rate.
Truveo says this is a combination of their approach to search as well as the fact that copyright holders are becoming more diligent about pulling down unauthorized uploads on YouTube and other sites. The result is that YouTube is no longer the single place to find good video clips. People are turning to search to find Daily Show clips on the Comedy Central website, for example, instead of just looking for them on Youtube.
The company is also partnering outside of AOL to get broader distribution for the engine. Brightcove, Clevver, CSTV, Flock, Pageflakes, PureVideo, Qwest, Search.com, Sportingo, Netvibes, Widgetbox and YourMinis all now use Truveo for video search, joining existing partners AOL Video, AOL Search, Excite, Infospace.
There’s a new kid on the block, though, called CastTV, which recently announced a $3.1 million Series A round of financing from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They haven’t launched yet, but the results from demos show it to be as good or better than Truveo. Given that AOL already owns Truveo, look for a quick acquisition of CastTV, probably by Google, if the technology is as good as the demos suggest.
See all
Post
shamless plug..:)
40 million visitors a month … really?!? Quantcast and Compete indicate Truveo probably gets less than 40 THOUSAND US visitors a month. Something doesn’t add up here.
There’s a few Truveo jobs posted on CrunchBoard, for context.
To be clear, the 40M visitors per month number represents the total usage across all of the websites that are currently powered by Truveo video search. Truveo.com is only one of many websites that are currently powered by Truveo.
50% per month, maybe. That other number . . . .
Keith, I assume the plug refers to CastTV?
What does “powered by Truveo video search” mean Tim - “indexed by”? If so, that’s a supremely disingenuous metric- to add all of those site’s traffic up and say Truveo gets 40 million uniques.
I’ve recently heard that as much as 80% of people find video through referral from their friends, and the rest from search and browse. Has anyone seen any hard stats on this?
Truveo is quite good and I also use it at http://www.veetube.com
whether 40 mm / mo is valid or not (sounds like not) significant growth in the truveo.com site’s traffic is not surprising. i have noticed them advertising significantly on talk radio, including howard stern and opie and anthony.
that said, i’m impressed with the results their able to generate. the interface, however, is hideous to look at and personally a huge deterrent to me even using the site.
Powered by Truveo means that our search box is in front of 40 million unique monthly visitors, not on Truveo.com but other sites.
This does NOT refer the sites we index.
Adam, how many queries per day is Truveo getting on its own site and through its partners? That’s probably a more fair indicator of how popular it is.
- TruVeo -
- Seems to be easy technology / something Google could implement within a month or two …
- the technology to Scrape the data around the video / seems simple.
Apart from TruVeo there are other exclusive video search engines like Blinkx and VeZoom. Of the three I have found that VeZoom, returns the most relevant results and they are marketing it as the World’s Most Comprehensive Video Search engine. What do you think?
Apart from TruVeo there are other exclusive video search engines like Blinkx and VeZoom. Of the three I have found that VeZoom, returns the most relevant results and they are marketing it as the World’s Most Comprehensive Video Search engine.
well, video seach is still in early sage and it will take more and more time to get it closer. The idea is people look for words wehnn the come on the web, and video is just an accesory. The video search will also be a fashion, rtaher than the reality