Video search engine Truveo has released the results from it’s internal survey. Claiming that no other body is conducting studies of video search engines, Truveo has released both its results and its methodology to encourage other video search engines to follow suite. Its results claim that Truveo provides videos from a far wider number sites than other industry-leading video search engines.
Test Method
The study compared video search engines by measuring their coverage of websites with European video content:
1. Select a video to search for.
2. Search for it in a video search engine.
3. Record if the video was found.
4. Repeat steps 1 to 3 for more videos and more video search engines.
Truveo ran over 5,000 searches, testing video-search engines across various European markets.
For more details on the methodology, see here: http://developer.truveo.com/CoverageStudy/index.php?c=eu
From the release:
Abbas D. Tahzib, Head of Business Development EMEA, Truveo said “Truveo is making its methodology publicly available, to encourage independent testing and to guide consumers when choosing a video search engine. Video search will become more and more important as the online video market will mature, thus become more fragmented. This is similar to how the browse Internet market evolved from browse traffic going to large Internet portals, such as Yahoo, AOL, MSN to a fragement browse market where web search, led by Google, become valuable. YouTube will eventually become less of a default destination for online video and niches may arise. In the US, sites like Hulu.com, but also the TV broadcasters are publishing their professional video content on their site to attract the online audience.”
What we think?
This is a fairly bold claim, so I checked out the Truveo website to see what there was to see. I’ve got to say, I was impressed with what I encountered. The opening page offers the traditional selection of clips pushed on the basis of popularity and views. However, search bar carries various categories including (interestingly) the most Twittered video.
The video I was looking for was a music video, for a song I’ve had stuck in my head for days. I didn’t know the song name, so I just stuck in the band.
Clicking on the search boxes first suggestion for an actual video, I was immediately pointed in the direction of over 1,400 search results from a huge number of video sources. When the first several pages of results turned out to be relevant, I stopped looking.
So like I said, I was impressed. There are some things that can definitely be improved. Since Truveo is a pan-European effort, I got a lot of results in different languages (only one of which I speak). So better filtering by nation is needed, but overall the experience was excellent. Admittedly, searching for an extremely popular single from a well-known isn’t exactly a challenging search – I’ll continue to run more difficult searches on Truveo and see how it does.
If that quality of service can be carried over to it’s mobile service, currently in beta, I’d be interested to see what effect it might have.
