Yahoo! adds video search

By Steve Malone

Posted on 17 Dec 2004 at 15:10

Yahoo! has added a 'video search function to its index. Searchers can search from some five million different videos in a variety of popular multimedia files.

Yahoo!'s video database contains video files in all the most common formats including media files, including MPEG, AVI, Microsoft's Windows Media, Apple Computer's QuickTime, and Real Networks' Real Media.

The company is also asking publishers and bloggers to submit video feeds via Media 2.0 RSS to allow syndication multimedia content such as TV and video clips, movies, images, and audio. By encouraging everyone from movie studios to blogger podcasts to submit their files to the service, Yahoo! hopes to build a strong presence in the market before their competitors can get their versions out.

Yahoo! has developed the video search following the explosion in broadband subscriptions world wide this year. A broadband connection makes video downloading and streaming a much more practical proposition than dial-up. In the UK, for example, the Office for National Statistics noted in September that broadband had overtaken dial-up in the UK as the principle method of domestic Internet connection.

As you might imagine, the potential for finding adult content is endless. Therefore the video search has filters enabled to remove such content from the results.

Doubtless, Google, MSN et al will all be launching 'beta' video searches in the coming weeks. In the meantime you can find the beta version of the Yahoo! Video Search is at video.search.yahoo.com/.