Every Wednesday on AltSearchEngines, we like to get the straight scoop directly from an alternative search engine CEO. Today we are visiting with Elias Shams, CEO of Searchles. We have asked for some news about their latest developments.

Online video has seemingly exploded into our everyday lives this past year – more and more so the mainstream media has started to catch on.  It started with YouTube and is expanding further with a wealth of competition nipping at YouTube’s heels – most notably the launch of NBC and Fox Networks-supported Hulu this past week, streaming full episodes of popular TV shows and broadcasts. 

How could we facilitate our users’ utilization of this web-phenomenon? As part of Searchles’ social bookmarking, social networking, and social search platform (the social threesome) – we’ve enabled users to index videos since our launch in September 2006 – initially supporting YouTube, Google, and MySpace videos, and then expanding our indexing capabilities a few months ago to support Metacafe, Veoh, Liveleak and CollegeHumor as these sites’ popularity grew in the web community.  Enabling video-sharing from these multiple sources through Searchles was obviously important, but we also realized the inherent value in developing features that would further enhance our users’ experiences with online video – in both viewing and sharing.

In March 2007, we launched Searchles TV – a video-aggregating feature that allowed users to mash up videos from multiple sources and stream them back-to-back within a single, embeddable player.  This proved to be pretty valuable for users on-site, for blog embeds, and for MySpace profiles as users were able to share and view their favorite videos in one place with smooth streaming and display.  However, we knew we could take online video a step further in order to really offer our users the value of creative control.

The resulting web-tool is Searchles TV Remash, recently launched in beta. Remash is a universal online video editing tool that allows users to edit ANY YouTube video and subsequently mash-up the video cuts into a Searchles channel – just like our Searchles TV video-aggregator.  For the first time, users have one-stop access to a tool that requires virtually no learning curve and offers unlimited creative potential in presentation and viewing of online video.  We realized with the glut of information and video content on the web, the average web-user wants more than anything to have the ability and tools necessary to be concise – to cut to their point.  Our Remash feature is an effective response to this need in video-sharing.

Furthermore, updates made to a Searchles Remash channel on-site – whether adding a video, further editing a video clip, or reordering the video content – will automatically syndicate across the web wherever the Remash channel is embedded.

Haven’t you ever just wanted to just grab a 1-minute clip from that 5-minute video?  We felt your pain.  We just took it a step further with useful mash-up and embedding capabilities.  Going forward we’re working towards adding the ability to edit videos from other growing video sites with Searchles TV Remash.