Webware

Google showed off video trailers inside text ads for financial analysts Wednesday.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Google sought to remind financial analysts Wednesday that despite all the attention it devotes to projects like Google Apps, staying on top of search and search advertising is what really matters.

The first in a series of investor Webcasts was held Wednesday by Google CFO Patrick Pichette and several other executives, and while the company did not unearth any ground-breaking shifts in strategy or new products, it did cast a spotlight on some recent improvements that the company believes have enhanced the search experience. Perhaps the most notable was the recent addition of video ads directly below text ads on the top or right-hand side of the search results page, which can be played directly on that page.

This started to emerge for some users last week according to ReelSEO, but Google is now offering advertisers a chance to insert a video trailer into their text ads. "In many cases, the best information is video," said Nick Fox, business product management director on Google's AdWords team.

For example, Fox demonstrated how Electronic Arts is using a video trailer inside an ad for the new Tiger Woods video game. The result is a marriage of the text ad format that Google has used to rise into a dominant Internet company with the display ad style that others, such as Yahoo, are hoping to finally make a success.

"Google hasn't made many changes to its text ad format and now sees this as a big opportunity," wrote J.P. Morgan's Imran Khan in a research note distributed after the Webcast. It can charge either by the click through to the advertiser's Web site or by the play of the video, therefore adding a revenue stream that didn't exist before.

If you're having trouble finding the right video online, video search engines are a great place to start your search. From professional content from major networks to user-generated clips, they will help you find just about anything you're looking for.

You won't find Google, Yahoo, or Bing in this roundup. The following list of services are designed specifically for those who want to find video. Since the aforementioned search engines will find anything on the Web, they don't fit into that category.

Find your videos

Blinkx: Blinkx is an extremely well-designed video search site that helps you find clips on topics ranging from tech to sports. According to the company, it currently has more than 35 million hours of videos cataloged. Judging by the outstanding selection, I'm inclined to believe that figure.

I liked Blinkx's search. Simply enter a keyword you're interested in and it will search sites like YouTube, Hulu, and major television networks to find what you're looking for. Unfortunately, the search results page is a little confusing. I also didn't like that the site automatically plays the top result when you get to the results page. It's an annoying feature that shouldn't be on by default. Other than those two issues, I liked Blinkx. It's one of the better video search engines on the Web.

Blinkx automatically starts the top video result.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

CastTV: CastTV finds television shows and cool videos on the Web. I was impressed by its selection. From new to old, you're likely to find at least one clip of your favorite show.

Unlike many of the other services in this roundup, CastTV relies heavily on popular video sites like Vimeo, blip.tv, and MegaVideo. Because of that, you might find some clips on CastTV that you won't find on "professional" sites like Hulu. For example, a full episode of "24" is currently listed in the site's search results. If you click that link, you'll be brought to MegaVideo to view it. Also, beware that some videos you click on might ask you to install a toolbar. It doesn't pop up often, but CastTV does require you to download its toolbar for some videos. In those cases, don't do it and move along.

CastTV has a bunch of television shows available.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Cooliris has just released a new version of its add-on that lets users run multiple instances of its media browsing wall in different tabs of the same browser. Previously, the only way to get it to run like this was to open it in different browsers. This way you can have one tab open to search YouTube videos, another that's browsing online photos, and a third that's playing a TV show off of Cooliris' Hulu.com interface.

Users are only limited in the number of Cooliris tabs they can have by what their computer is capable of. I ran four or five quite easily, and I can't see users needing more than that.

The company is also making it easier to share exactly what you're looking at on your Cooliris wall with others. It now creates a special Cooliris URL for each piece of media you click on. That link takes whoever you send it to, to the Cooliris media wall in the context of however you found that piece of media--that is, if they have the software installed. If they don't, the link won't take them anywhere, something the company says will change in a future iteration that will show a preview or link to the source in some way.

Right now these sharing URLs are quite long, although I'm told an internal shortening service is in the works. This will make it easier to share on places like Twitter and Facebook. This isn't just for users though, it's also for advertisers. These new links give Cooliris another way to track both incoming, and outgoing links. Up until now the company has been doing this internally. With this new system it's letting third party analytics tools like Google and Quantcast aggregate their own metrics.

Right now this new version only works on Firefox (Windows or Mac) and Internet Explorer but it will be headed to Safari users in the near future. Other small changes include a complete redesign of the scroll bar that lets users navigate around the wall of thumbnails. I've compiled this, and some of the other new features in a quick video embedded below:

While not nearly as sexy as YouTube on the iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile users have reason to celebrate with a new version of the YouTube's mobile application (download and review). The company boasts that it's 90 percent faster than the previous version in terms of how quickly it starts up, pulls up search results, and when a video begins to play. It also detects what connection you're on and will serve up a quality that will stream in the fastest.

YouTube 2.2 plays videos in landscape and portrait modes on the Samsung Omnia.

In the demo video below, both the application and the selected video begin to play around a second after they're launched. That's a whole lot faster than the iPhone, especially the launch time, which should make clicking on YouTube links in e-mails and while browsing a less painful experience. While YouTube for Mobile is available globally, it's only localized for Australia, Ireland, N.Z., UK, and the US. Regardless, Nokia N95 owners should be pleased:

On Tuesday, OneRiot, the social search engine that rose from the ashes of social browser extension Medium, is adding video. Users will now be able to search through videos from more than 30 video hosts, and just as it handles Web queries, the engine will put recently "buzzing" videos on top. This means the results of any given search term will change on an almost daily basis depending on what's trending, or as OneRiot calls it "raging."

OneRiot Vice President Tobias Peggs dropped by CNET's San Francisco office Monday to give me a demo of the service, and it already looks promising. For instance, searching for "shark attack" pulled up some gruesome videos from the past few days. The same search on Google came up with clips from one to two years ago.

With OneRiot's algorithm, of course, it could be the same old videos that show up as the top result, but as Peggs told me, the search tool's value is that these older videos can rise up to the top simply due to their connection with something that's timely or has been revived by social chatter. In my case it was simply seeing a shark attacking a large piece of meat off the side of a fishing boat, a clip that had been vetted as worthy of a watch by OneRiot's social sources.

One thing that's missing from the system but that will be added in a week or two is a way to filter these results. For now it's sorted by buzz factor, but new filters will let you sort by both overall popularity and how fresh the link is. This should make it simpler to figure out what's old and what's not.

Along with the addition of video, OneRiot's front page is getting a bit of a refresh. Instead of just headlines for trending stories, the site will include short summaries of the news to give you a tease of what's behind the link. Peggs says this will continue to develop as the product matures, effectively making the front page of OneRiot something closer to Digg or Technorati. Expect the focus on this to grow if OneRiot continues to go into other search verticals such as images, music, and product search.

OneRiot's new video search organizes results based on what's trending or getting buzz from its social sources.

(Credit: OneRiot/CNET)

If you had previously been using Videosurf's Greasemonkey script to preview videos from search engine results, the company has released a new Firefox add-on that does a bit more--and without the need for Greasemonkey.

Once installed in your browser, the add-on still lets you see previews of videos from search results on Google and Yahoo. However it now throws in video previews on FriendFeed pages, and adds a neat timeline view in YouTube that lets you skip to later parts of a video just like DVD chapter markers.

I had the Greasemonkey script installed on my machine last November, but recently turned it off. It directs links that would normally go to where the video is hosted to a special page on Videosurf where it has been re-embedded. This can be useful for some videos, but if you like reading comments and leaving ratings on the original video page it's adding an extra step to get there. Worth noting is that the Firefox iteration of this tool no longer does that.

With the extension installed you can skip to various parts of a video--as long as it's been indexed.

(Credit: Videosurf)

Want to sit back, relax, and watch comedic cat videos? Blinkx, an online video search engine, wants to help you unleash your inner couch potato.

The British company is redesigning its Web site by adding three new buttons: "Entertain Me," "Inform Me," and "Give Me My Own Channel." The idea is to help people get different classes of videos--entertaining videos, news, and videos related what they've sought before--without having to explicitly search for it.

"You don't have to say what you want. We'll just find it for you. We'll just supply it to you passively, like with TV," said Chief Executive and founder Suranga Chandratillake.

The "more information" button, a.k.a. the geek button, gives the more passive consumer a more control over the individual video and the stream the service queues up for watching.

(Credit: Blinkx)

Online video is booming. December was a record month, with U.S. viewers watching 14.3 billion online videos, 41 percent of them at Google, which operates YouTube. Blinkx's business is to try to connect people to these videos using search technology that looks not just at metadata such as video titles, but also words that are spoken and detected with speech recognition technology.

Of course the key for businesses is making money on the popularity of online video. Blinkx sells ads, probably with an ads-per-minute formula similar to what people are used to with TV, Chandratillake said. However, "When we first launch, we won't put on a lot of ads," he said.

Having tested the new options a bit, I can confirm the service works--and that getting your work done is tough when inundated with a dancing horses, Bruce Lee playing ping-pong with nunchucks, and adorable bunnies in bowls. It's nice that there's a skip-ahead button to pass on the stuff you don't care about, but after a few videos, I got three Paul Hunt transvestite gymnastic comedy routines in a sequence of four videos, and after about 20 videos I started getting repeats. So it looks like Blinkx's algorithm could use some sprucing up.

What I miss: no full-screen mode, no volume adjustment, no ability to rate videos to train the engine what entertaining videos you like (though there is a "similar videos" button), and no ability to click out to the original video if you want to rate it, share it with friends, or leave a comment.

The new Blinkx modes aren't totally passive. While watching the videos, users can click on a "more information button," which Blinkx internally calls the geek button because it enables more control and options for what's showing.

For example, Blinkx analyzes the video content, letting people skip ahead to different scenes via thumbnail images shown in the video player. And the application also can show faces of people in the video, letting users click on them to skip around the video.

The company's service shows video from a variety of sources. In the case of video from about 450 partners, Blinkx hosts it, but some is hosted elsewhere and embedded at the site, and in the case of the search results, Blinkx only offers descriptions and thumbnails that link to other sites' video.

The company has 65 employees and is hiring, Chandratillake said. In the six months ended Sept. 1, the company garnered $6.5 million in revenue; analysts expect $13 million to $14 million for the full fiscal year, which ends in March, he said.

"We expect to hit profitability in 2010," Chandratillake added.

Video search and identification tool VideoSurf has a new script for Greasemonkey users that lets you see VideoSurf-enhanced results on Google, Yahoo, and YouTube. If a result has been indexed by VideoSurf you'll see its timeline, along with links to each segment which skip you straight to that part of the video.

VideoSurf is advertising this as a way to see video results before you click on them, similar to some scripts and extensions that show you site thumbnails straight from search results or on-site links (like Snap). I found it to work particularly well on mainstream content, although videos that have not yet been processed by VideoSurf won't show up.

If you're a Greasemonkey user I'd say this is definitely worth a go. The same goes for any users who frequently click on videos in search results, only to be disappointed by what they end up being. VideoSurf's scene-by-scene analysis puts an end to any surprises.

Previously: VideoSurf demo nearly lives up to pre-show hype

VideoSurf's Greasemonkey extension puts scene-by-scene analysis in your search results--that is, as long as it's a mainstream piece of content.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

AT&T isn't the brand that comes to mind when you think of online video search, but let's get past that point: the telecommunications company has announced a beta version of a site called VideoCrawler, which can search more than 1,600 online video outlets. AT&T hasn't released a full list of compatible video sites, but Google's YouTube is one of them.

VideoCrawler was developed in conjunction with start-up Divvio, a search company that constructed the VideoCrawler platform.

VideoCrawler doesn't host any videos, but members can still compile playlists and share them through embeddable widgets.

Other players in this space include Blinkx and the AOL-owned Truveo.