AOL Buys Video Search Firm 44
Eric Newman writes "TheStreet.com is reporting that America Online has purchased Truveo.com. From the article: 'Truveo has a proprietary technology called visual crawling that lets it automatically discover video files on Web pages, enabling customers to see updated information on news, sports and entertainment. The acquisition, which closed Dec. 21, was AOL's fifth last year. News of the deal wasn't released until Tuesday. Terms were not disclosed.' Note that the deal closed the same week that Google bought a 5% stake in AOL, in part to collaborate on video technology."
the true meaning (Score:5, Funny)
And by "updated information", of course, they mean "porn".
Re:the true meaning (Score:1)
Didn't Google (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Didn't Google (Score:1)
Re:Didn't Google (Score:1)
How? (Score:4, Interesting)
How do you index videos and put context around them?
Does it parse the language that is being spoken? Does it read the subtitles? For example, if I snip a 1 minute story on the G-7 summit from CNN, how do you know what the story is about if I don't tell you? To my knowledge, there is no sophisticated technology solution for this aside from reading the subtitles and indexing that.
I've thought about this alot. Everyone and their dog seems to be coming out with a video search engine of somekind and not a single implementation has explained how they are going to do the indexing.
I suppose they could take the Yahoo approach and view/sort each video that is submitted. But that is not a realistic long term solution, IMHO.
Re:How? (Score:3, Insightful)
As for your question -- presumably you could pipe the audio portion to a speech-to-text tool and parse that, no?
Re:How? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How? (Score:3, Interesting)
If I understood the Truveo site correctly -- yeah, it's similar to Google image search except with a supposedly better crawler.
Re:How? (Score:1)
I think you're right about that. If it was actually crawling the video itself I believe that would be breaching the copyright violation since the crawler would be acessing information that would not be publicly available. I'm almost positive that there is no way that major movie corporations would agree to letting aol just search through their content and make it searchable that way. I mean w
Re:How? (Score:2)
Re:How? (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of that can be automatically populated, such as creation date, length and file type. Some has to be manually added, such as title, rating, or genre.
Re:How? (Score:2, Informative)
A Fast Multi-Resolution Block Matching Algorithm for Multiple-Frame Motion Estimation [oxfordjournals.org]
Efficient Video Similarity Measurement and Searc [berkeley.edu] (probably grad students here)
I felt my brain being damaged while I looked them over, but they appear to employ something similar to image matching with the added component of movement. It looks like if they are implemented as desired, you could find video similar to a reference piece. This is not useful
Video search/indexing research (Score:1)
Monkey in a Box (Score:1)
I tried visual crawling once (Score:4, Interesting)
But seriously folks, the search engine works rather well. Its interesting to note that the ads on truveo are by google, and http://video.google.com/ [google.com] is another viable alternative.
Even though we are just getting started, we have already indexed an extensive collection of web video that you will not find in any other search engine.
Google will soon take care of that.
yawn... wake me up when its something new (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:yawn... wake me up when its something new (Score:1)
Wake Up (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wake Up (Score:1)
I did read the article and a good portion of the truveo website. All I found was marketing speak about how they "visually crawl" the internet and how they visually interpret surrounding content.
Regardless of what they do to interpret the pages & video, it boils down to the fact that they are extracting information content from the pages/v
You've got (Score:2, Funny)
Re:You've got (Score:1)
Is it spam if you care?
video search, eh? (Score:2, Funny)
"Hey, looks like Clippy found 5000 new videos, let's see what
Useless (Score:2)
AOL has a New Video Portal (Score:2, Informative)
Its video delivered by Kontiki's p2p grid technology .
Wonder if Google will end up delivering content in this Manner .
Re:AOL has a New Video Portal (Score:2)
Re:AOL has a New Video Portal (Score:1)
BTW (Score:2)
"The Internet is for Porn" is from the outrageously funny Broadway musical "Avenue Q", a takeoff of Sesame Street.
SingingFish? (Score:2)
Singingfish is was a Seattle based video search and image search company which was picked up by AOL. Kind of weird that they would be two of the same type of company.
Bandwidth? (Score:2)