Multimedia search is hot at DEMO

There’s a number of companies debuting search-related products here at DEMO 2006. Two stood out to me: Truveo (now owned by AOL) is a specialized search engine that looks for video on the Web. It does so by looking at a page as a human would rather than a typical search engine, which looks for blocks of text to index. Truveo looks for the video and the collects metadate from the video file’s header and the text surrounding it. They claim to offer much more comphrensive video search results than some of the other services out there. Soon, they will be intergrated into the AOL Video portal. Nexidia takes a slightly different approach. They index content both by the text metadata as well as doing speech recognition on the audio in the file, down to individual phonemes (the smallest part of speech). However, they’re not offering this as standalone service. Instead, they’re looking to license it to content producers and aggregators.