America Online Inc. this week upgraded its online video search engine with the integration of technology from Truveo Inc., a company AOL acquired in December.
AOL bought Burlingame, Calif.-based, Truveo in order to expand the portal's ability to find video on the Web. AOL, a Dulles, Va., unit of Time Warner Inc., has made online video a key focus of its free Web portal.
Truveo uses proprietary Web crawling technology that it calls "visual crawling." The technology goes beyond traditional means of video search by examining the context of the surrounding Web application, which often reveals detailed metadata about the video, the company said. Other search engines are not as effective, because they examine only closed-caption transcripts and import RSS feeds to deliver results to user queries.
Truveo indexes 1.8 million videos, a significant expansion over AOL's existing archive of 20,000+ original and licensed videos, and the 2.5 million videos from the Web indexed through Singingfish.com, a company AOL acquired in 2003.
In addition to Truveo, the update of AOL Video Search includes "Hi-Q Videos" in its index, a company spokeswoman said. The video-playback format enables full-screen views.
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