Yahoo Takes Video Search Out of Beta

By Nate Mook | Published May 5, 2005, 11:23 AM

Yahoo has deemed its new video search ready for primetime, shedding its beta trappings and boasting additional content from CBS News, MTV and more. The move follows the recent expansion of Google Video, still in beta, which has added 14 TV channels to its archive of searchable video content.

With broadband Internet connectivity becoming a staple of most households, search engines are looking for new ways to engage visitors. Video content that once took hours to download can be accessed in mere seconds, providing another avenue of content distribution for publishers and search providers.

Yahoo has taken a slightly different approach from Google when it comes to indexing video content. Google archives the closed captioning data from television programming, while Yahoo scours the text surrounding video links and a file's metadata.

Content included in Yahoo Video Search includes trailers from iFilm, music videos from MTV and VH1, news clips from Reuters and CBS, along with segments from The Food Network, Discovery Channel and Travel Channel.

Yahoo is also accepting RSS-based submissions for user-created video content, but the search engine will not host the video files like rival Google. Google has endeavored to create a complete distribution platform in which content owners upload video to Google's servers and maintain control over distribution rights.

Although it would not specify the number of video clips it has indexed, Yahoo has called its video search the most comprehensive.