Bangalore  – Truveo’s video search engine provides the most comprehensive results of any major search engine online, according to an extensive study conducted by the search engine team. The study, conducted during the past four weeks, looked at how well Truveo, Blinkx, Google Video, Microsoft Live Video Search and Yahoo! Video Search covered the top 100 Alexa-rated news, sports, TV, music and movie sites that have video content. The study showed that Truveo covered 86 of those sites; Blinkx covered 20; Microsoft Live Video Search covered 17; Google Video covered three and Yahoo! Video Search covered two.

Truveo conducted this coverage test itself because currently no major testing organization, publication or consulting firm is publicly conducting ongoing quality studies of video search engines. Truveo believes that while coverage tests can be conducted in an objective manner, relevancy-testing needs to be conducted by an independent third party due to the subjective nature of some of the judging. In order to encourage ongoing video search testing by an independent organization, which will help all video search engines improve and will help consumers choose a video search engine, Truveo is making its methodology publicly available.

“When consumers want to search for videos about news, sports, TV, music, movies and more, Truveo should be their first stop,” said Kevin Conroy, EVP of AOL.

“Today’s results mark an important change for video search engines. For a long time, video search engines have relied on feed relationships with video content producers. But with the speed of growth of online video, while still somewhat important, feed relationships can no longer compete with fast quality advanced crawlers,” said Pete Kocks, President of Truveo and Vice President of AOL. “Our crawlers are the best in the business and that is what has allowed us to build an index of over 200 million videos and keep up with the tens of thousands of new videos that appear each day.”

“What is of even more interest to local markets where a search engine like Truveo is concerned is that the video search engines latest updates enables it to throw up searches which are relevant to the user’s locality or market”, says PG Ponnapa, VP and GM, AOL India Portal

“Previously, Truveo, like most video search engines, had one single relevancy and ranking algorithm for all searches no matter where the search originated. So, a search in India for “football” would turn up the same videos as a search in U.S. for football even though the two searchers were most likely looking for and expecting completely different results. Now, Truveo’s new international ranking and relevancy algorithm looks at the country of origin for the search and uses this to adjust how much importance is given to various factors including the language and country of origin for the videos that match the search query”, he added.

The Truveo India site http://in.truveo.com, can be accessed through the AOL India Portal www.aol.in

Test Methodology
The test, which consisted of over 5,000 individual queries, looked at each search engine to determine how well it covered the top 100 Alexa-rated news, sports, TV, music and movie websites that have video content.  To develop the list of 100 websites Truveo selected the top 100 Alexa-ranked video content websites with the highest traffic rank (as recorded on August 6, 2008) for each of the following categories: news, sports, TV, music and movies. These five lists were combined and sorted by traffic rank. Sites were then checked to ensure they had a reasonable number of videos and were appropriate for the study. The top 100 sites on this list were then selected for testing.

Then, the study selected 10 representative videos from each of the websites and queried each search engine for each video. If a search engine returned at least five of the 10 representative videos, it was counted as covering that website. Because the test was designed to measure coverage, the search engine needed to return the exact video from the original site in order to be counted. The queries were run between August 8, 2008 and August 28, 2008.

Source: Truveo