The search engine giant Yahoo Inc. (www.yahoo.com) announced on December 17 a beta version of a new search service for videos. Called Yahoo! Video Search (http://video.search.yahoo.com), the search engine crawls the Web for different types of media files, including Microsoft's Windows Media, Apple Computer's QuickTime, and RealNetworks' Real Media. The engine also will soon include XML-based RSS feeds, podcasts, and other media formats, according to Yahoo executives.
Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's director of Media Search, said that Yahoo has made its full index of movie and music trailers available on Yahoo! Video Search beta, that the company is attempting to build a much larger media index, that Yahoo hopes bloggers and members of the technology community will help build the media index, and that Yahoo is urging video content providers to attach metadata to their media files to make it easier for the search crawlers to find and index content.
The global software giant Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) has also said it is working on a searchable video platform to integrate with the pending launch of MSN Search, while America Online's visual search technology vendor Singingfish (www.singingfish.com) recently updated its multimedia content to 20 million.
