Welcome back to a new edition of Israeli search. You may remember this series from the not-so-accidentally-titled strong>Search is Happening in Israel Part I and Search is Happening in Israel Part II. Today we will feature another 3 Israeli startups along with an old friend of ASE who has made some massive improvements worth reposting. Video search, social search, image search, and virtually everything search. What keeps these Hebrew-speakers going is hard to determine, but rumor has it that it might be the סחוג, which is a nuclear Yemenite/Israeli version of hot sauce in oily-goop form. Use with caution.

VideoSurf – Lior Delgo and Professor Achi Brandt

These guys are here to completely revamp how we search for video. The problem: YouTube searches for video based on arbitrary textual titles people decide to get them. This means, essentially, that YouTube does not search video. It searches video titles. If you want to actually search for video within the video itself, you’ll have to go to VideoSurf.

What’s the advantage of this? To name one, if some schmegegie decides to give his video a title that doesn’t have anything to do with the video, VideoSurf won’t be fooled. They also allow visually navigation through their results to find the specific scenes, people or moments you most want to see. Result –less time searching, more entertainment.

VideoSurf also allws a search by character. The top row of your search will give you the option to search for videos only with a certain character in them. Type in Jennifer Aniston, and you’ll have the option of searching for videos featuring only her. This obviously becomes more useful when you’re looking for an actor or actress and scenes from movies they played in.

Category narrowing allows you to include or exclude videos that fall within a certain content type (ex. Slideshows, TV Full Episodes, Full Movies) or genre (ex. Funny Videos, News Videos, Music Videos, Celebrity Videos, Sports Videos, etc). Click on sports videos, you’ll only get that. How? Not through arbitrary sports titles, but through actual sports footage in the video. Looking for one of your favorite football plays? Start with the sports options. Go from there.

You can sort by relevance, popularity, freshness, and the length of the video. This last feature was especially helpful in getting a full version of the Palin interview. I sorted by longest first, and got the full interview (divided into three parts )in one of the first links.

One final feature that VideoSurf has is the “Save Search to My Homepage” button that appears at the top of any search result page. They’ll save the search terms you used plus any additional filters that you selected (like video sources or categories you excluded) and you can access it from the “My Searches” tab on your VideoSurf homepage.

Right now they are in stealth mode, with invitation being handed out to testers. Fill in your email address at their homepage to get one.

Sightix – Shaul Levy and Ari Gottesmann


This one’s based in Netanya, smack in the middle of Israel west, and only, Mediterranean coast. Before I say anything, watch this:

According to Sightix, it’s not primarily WHAT you know, but WHO you know. Sightix partners with Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace to sift through the content of all the searcher’s personal and business connections, ranking the results gleaned from each user based on the strength of their connection to the searcher.

Ari Gottesmann goes so far as to say social search will eliminate “generic search results” that may be found with the mainstream, putting people first, content second. Say you’re looking for a restaurant, ski resort or even a lawyer, your personal tastes will differ from the rest of the searchers in cyberspace.The Sightix platform also maps the search results, helping the user to connect with someone in their extended social network.

The company aims to partner with other networking sites worldwide, in the hope of fulfilling industry analysts’ and investors’ predictions of unseating the “Google Giant” as the definitive search solution for Social Networks. “We see ourselves as David in the fight against Goliath. As Israelis, we are fully aware of the biblical result of that battle…and when combined with the amazing high-tech achievements of our tiny country, we’re optimistic.” Hubris? Who am I to say? We’ll see what happens.

You will need to fill some contact details and copy a simple HTML code in order to integrate it in your site. To begin the integration process strong>try clicking here.

Picitup – Alon and Danny Atsmon

Sure, we’ve featured Picitup before, but that was before they invaded the shopping market! They have some suspenseful music, too. It’ll have you on the edge of your seat, unless you’re standing. Feel free to get on your tiptoes if such be the case.

Aside from that video, here’s another example. You want a potholder? Type that in here. Want it blue? Click colors, and click blue. If you’re color blind like me and can’t tell if it’s blue or purple, don’t worry. The colors are labeled with words. If you’re word-blind, you won’t be reading this anyway. You want it star-shaped? Click on the star shape. See what you find. I have a feeling they’ll be blue potholders with stars on them. Then click on similar images. See what they have. Then buy something.

Amazing, eh? YES.

Joongel – Dror Ceder and Daniel Tal

Based in Ramat HaSharon, yes – Israel, maybe the name, a sort of endearing Israeli interpretation of the word jungle, will pull your cute strings long enough for you to give this one a serious perusing. They’re really touting their travel search engine, which searches these guys on the right here though Joongel is really everything in one long dropdown menu. Here’s a picture of what they offer.

Pick any of those and put them in your plugin menu, you’ll be up and Joongeling in about 30 seconds. According to Dror, the most used searches so far are images, price comparison, torrents, music, and jobs. So you can either type in some text for a generic Google search, are you can pick the plugin from a dropdown menu and search for some specific stuff.

Type your query, and choose a category from their homepage. Why didn’t somebody think of adding search categories before? You’d think it was obvious, but no. And don’t be fooled people – the footer on the bottom of the hompage that says HEALTH, TRAVEL, COOKING…those are links people. Click on them and you can get to Joongel’s subsidiary websites and do some hefty stuff. As Axl Rose would say, “Welcome to the Joongel, we’ve got fun and games. We’ve got everything you want…(insert raspy catlike voice here).

Will there be a fourth edition to the Israel search? The country is unpredictable. Her prime minister just resigned and she doesn’t even have a ruling government right now, but something tells me we’ll see some more action soon.