The consolidation of sites after being acquired by a large player is not unexpected but still worth noting. Now multimedia search engine, SingingFish.com redirects to AOL Video Search.

SingingFish began in the late 90’s by Mike Behlke, Ken Berkun, John DeRosa, and Eric Rehm. The company was purchased by Thomson Multimedia in in 2000 for $30 million. SingingFish crawled the open web multimedia content.

In November 2003, Thomson sold SingingFish to AOL.

When AOL relaunched their video search service in 2005, they included results from SingingFish. However, the SingingFish engine remained online as a separate site.

A little over a year ago, AOL acquired multimedia crawling technology and site Truveo for an undisclosed sum.

The Truveo site now redirects to SearchVideo (not to be confused with SearchforVideo) which is clearly labeled as an AOL service and is a simple yet effective interface that aggregates video content from numerous sites including:
+ MySpace
+ YouTube
+ Google Video
+ StreetFire.net
+ YoQoo
+ Grouper
+ Mofile
+ MSN Video
+ Revver
+ IFILM
and others.

SearchVideo offers numerous tools to limit/refine a search (by format, quality, cost, etc.) by just clicking. You can also quickly limit to video available via AOL’s Hi-Q service.

Finally, unlike AOL Video, SearchVideo pages contain no advertising/sponsored results.

Thanks to ResourceShelf contributing editor, Dan Giancaterino, for his assistance with this post.

Postscript: Directly above the AOL Video search box at Video.aol.com you’ll now see the phrase “Powered by TRUVEO.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 12:53 am and is filed under Information Industry, Multimedia Search, Search Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.