NOW, A TOOL TO FIND RARE VIDEO CLIPS ON THE WEB

Anand Parthasarathy, Bangalore
The Hindu

A small California-based company has launched trial versions of a new Internet search tool, which lets you locate difficult-to-find video clips on the Web — something most of the big-name search engines are not good at. Truveo, just 18 months old, says it has created a new visual crawling technology that reaches and indexes the best video files, which may escape conventional search techniques, since these are mostly based on text. Truveo's tool, on the other hand, looks for the visual attributes. 

The company's technical advisers include Raj Reddy, father of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and Rajeev Motwani, an expert in the mathematics behind search engines, at Stanford University. 

The tool, which can be tried at www.truveo.com, picks up good quality video based on key words and also allows you to sort by date, duration and quality. A search using the term "Aishwarya Rai" turned up two clips from the actress' film Bride and Prejudice. "Manmohan Singh" found six clips.