Last week Read/WriteWeb focused on Online Music, and we covered my Top 10 Alternative Music Search Engines (later amended to add the Musicmachine). This week, R/WW is looking into Online Video, so naturally I went looking for 10 good Alternative Video Search Engines. But I needed a way to efficiently evaluate them. For Music Search, I asked each search engine to find Rihanna’s hit song Umbrella, which was probably too easy.

So this time I decided to mix it up a bit. I asked each Video search engine to first find for me Michael Wesch’s “Web 2.0 – The Machine is Us/ing Us” sometimes referred to as the most watched video in the history of the Internet with over 3.2 million views on YouTube alone. It is certainly my #1 video, and if you’ve never seen it, all 10 of these search engines were able to find it, although some more easily than others. But that usually just involved adjusting the keywords until you got a match.

That was the easy test. If you couldn’t find that video, you should just pack it in. The hard test was to find my favorite SNL (Saturday Night Live) skit – Nicholas Cage doing “Tiny Elvis.” My control was Google Video, which only had 6 hits, and only 1 was this video. A pretty good challenge. Here are the results in alphabetical order.

blinkx: Yes to both.

clipblast! Update: Reader found Tiny Elvis!

dabble: Correction: Yes to both.

everyzing: No for Tiny Elvis.

exalead: No for Tiny Elvis.

Fooooo (newcomer): Yes to both.

metacafe: No for Tiny Elvis.

pixsy: Yes to both.

PureVideo: Yes to both.

VidSea (newcomer): Yes to both.

Scientific? Hardly. Accurate? – yes, as far as it goes. I looked for a “relevant” match on the first page, but you can double-check me. Fair? I think so. Video search is video search, after all.

How about you? Care to try some? If you do, please leave a comment!

And thank you, thank you very much.