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The announcement follows a week in which Google launched its video store and Apple announced stunning growth of the video content of iTunes with a million videos sold in its first month of operation.

AOL has been tempted to buy Truveo because of its proprietary web crawling technology called 'Visual Crawling'. AOL says that Truveo has the ability to uncover video files and related information on complex, dynamic web pages. Truveo will continually crawl the most popular video content sites

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on the web in real-time to provide visitors with an up to date set of relevant results that will include breaking news coverage, sports, and entertainment video.

AOL says that it will be integrating the technology with its own AOL Video Search service launched in June of last year with the aim of building it up into a challenger both to Apple and to new best buddy Google.

AOL has been investing heavily in video this year as it seeks to reinvent itself as a content provider and move away from its roots as a dial up ISP - a market that is shrinking rapidly with the world wide take up of broadband. Building on the foundations of parent Time Warner's huge library of TV shows and movies. AOL claims that its Video Search now sports an extensive library of over 20,000 licensed and original videos and some 2.5 million uncovered by the SingingFish video search technology it acquired in 2003. Other content includes the Warner Brothers 'In2TV' and the AOL-Telepictures new, on-demand entertainment news network TMZ.com

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.