Truveo : Search Engine for Video
I love YouTube, and have found some amazing things on there, but there’s whole world of video online beyond what you’ll ever find on YouTube. I used to use Google’s Video Search , but was never particularly impressed with the results. I knew there had to be something better…
And then I found Truveo, a video search engine that makes it easy to find all kinds of video content from around the web. A Truveo search on Puffins, for example, finds videos from professional media organizations like National Geographic, the BBC and NECN, as well as social sites like YouTube and Vimeo — the best of both worlds.
Truveo is a great reference resource, a way to find relevant video on all kinds of topics. For example, someone interested in information about the journalist Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, might be very interested in the Malcolm Gladwell videos found in a quick Truveo search, which includes videos from sources as diverse as Business Week and Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, as well as podcasts from the New York and Pop!Tech, and speeches from Fora.tv.
It’s not just the quality of the search results that make Truveo so useful, it’s also the way those results are displayed in a concise, grid format, with lots of options for sorting and refining the search results. There are options along the top of every page that let you sort results by Most Relevant, Most Recent, Most Viewed This Month, Most Viewed of All Time, etc. If you scroll down below the main search results grid, you’ll find various featured content. This varies depending on your search. For example, for a search on origami, you’ll find featured channels (content providers) like MetaCafe and Revver, and a list of other channels, like HowCast. A search on the name of jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden also has facets for channels, but also tags like “ukelele” and “armstrong.”
Every set of search results also has two buttons, Feed and Snag. Feed is an RSS/XML feed of your search results, handy for putting into your feed reader, personalized Google page, etc. Snag is lets you create a nice blog widget of search results, which you can add to any blog or webpage. Here’s my snag widget for the Malcolm Gladwell search:
I highly recommend Truveo — I can’t imagine how I lived without it!
