BANGALORE: A small California-based company has launched trial versions of a new Internet search tool, which lets you locate difficult-to-find video clips on the Web — something most of the big-name search engines are not good at. Truveo, just 18 months old, says it has created a new visual crawling technology that reaches and indexes the best video files, which may escape conventional search techniques, since these are mostly based on text. Truveo's tool, on the other hand, looks for the visual attributes.

The company's technical advisers include Raj Reddy, father of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and Rajeev Motwani, an expert in the mathematics behind search engines, at Stanford University.

The tool, which can be tried at www.truveo.com, picks up good quality video based on key words and also allows you to sort by date, duration and quality. A search using the term "Aishwarya Rai" turned up two clips from the actress' film Bride and Prejudice. "Manmohan Singh" found six clips — BBC and Reuters news items.

Typing in "Britney Spears" — always in the top 10 of Internet searches — one will find 307 clips from her videos and interviews.

After Podcasting — publishing audio broadcasts via Internet — became a craze, quite a few services have sprung up to monitor Web TV and video content. One of the most used seems to be Blinx: www.blinx.com.

The web monitor www.searchenginewatch.com lists a dozen sites that specialise in video and audio searches. Popular search engines such as Yahoo do video searches and may in fact turn up more videos if common search terms are entered: Yahoo hits 30 videos for "Manmohan Singh."

But Truveo's trawling technology may have the edge, netting videos that escape normal text-based searches.

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