Bing displays the source of the video file and its length under the thumbnail. The search engine does not present video search results as a single scrollable page, but requires you to click successive pages.

The sources Microsoft is pulling results from appear to include:

• MSN
• AOL
• MTV
• Hulu
• ESPN
• YouTube
• MySpace
• DailyMotion
• MetaCafe

Trial searches showed some degree of duplication of videos in the results, so the technology may still need a little tweaking.

The fact that the “hover” feature can present porn video to kids has raised the ire of several commentators, most notably CNET columnist Larry Magid. He wrote, “…when I searched for a word that was sure to bring up porn, I was first warned that it ‘may return explicit adult content’ and told that ‘to view these videos, turn off safe search.’ One click later, safe search was off and I was looking a page of naughty thumbnails. And, as advertised, hovering the mouse over a thumbnail started the video and audio. Even when playing in a small thumbnail, it was unmistakably hard core porn.” Magid went on to warn parents that ther only option regarding their kids and porn is to “watch them, educate them or filter them.”

Magid admitted other search engines enable kids to find porn but complained that Bing made it “too easy. He noted that filtering programs built into Vista and Mac OS can block porn sites but it is uncleart how they worked with Bing.

At least one commercial filtering software claimed to block Bing “hover” porn. According to its company blog, Safe Eyes filtering software “blocks all pornographic content on Bing and Google searches out of the box.”

Microsoft responded to the controversy by making changes in Bing’s video search functionality that made it easier for parents to monitor or block what thier kids are viewing on Bing. The first was that “explicit images and video content will now be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain, which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be.” This change enables parents to use filters built into 3rd party software and into Mac OS and Vista.

The second change was that Microsoft will return the “source URL” of videos and images so that a filter that blocks a soecific site will also block images or videos from that site. Magid tested Bing video search with the new changes and expressed satisfaction that the changes worked as intended and made Bing safer for kids. But he cautioned that parents need to remain vigilant about thier children’s internet surfing.

Most search engines, Google included, now have a “freshness” filter which introduces “recency” as a search criteria. The search giant has a specific initiative, QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) to incorporate recency and freshness in determining relevance. Pinny believes users will adopt these new ”freshness” tools and that retailers who are ready will benefit.

Mr. Gniwisch says that with Google Inc. offering consumers new search options, such as specifying new content loaded to web pages within the past 24 hours, online retailers need to re-think how they optimize their site content for natural search. He adds, “Now that Google is allowing more options in search, retailers could be losing out if they’re not properly categorizing content.”

The key to taking advantage of new search options is to index a site’s content for search engines daily,” Gniwisch says. He adds that if that’s not feasible, retailers should update content daily on a blog that links to their e-commerce site, so that their retail site will have a better chance of appearing high up in natural search rankings for searches conducted for recent time periods, as well as for particular types of content.

Despite whether or not rapid adoption of the new user search options is imminent, Ice.com is working to optimize its web site maximize natural search exposure, Gniwisch says. Among the techniques being tested is a daily reload via RSS of all the site’s products. It’s too soon to tell if this will be read by the googlebot as duplicate content and dinged or rewarded for freshness.

“Google Search Options” is Google’s suite of features designed to enable “real time” search. It has been suggested that this feature set is intended to allow Google to compete with Twitter in “real time” search. The feature set allows users to  drill down into search results by recency , content type and more. Once turned on (by clicking “Show Options” in any search result), the feature appears as a left-hand column next to search results Time based filtering allows users to look at only results created recently, within the last day, the last week, or the last year.

Mindshare developed its translation of TV GRPs to apply to web video in association with the YuMe video ad network.  The idea is that Mindshare’s traditional TV clients like Unilever will start buying web video ad using the same standard they apply to broadcast and cable television.  With a common standard for TV and web, the thinking is that advertisers will increase their web video spending.

GRPs are a metric derived from the sum of the reach of a campaign times the frequency that the target audience was exposed to the ad.  Many agencies and advertisers are comfortable with this measure and are hesitant to move dollars to online video without the same standard metric.  TV has used the GRP standard for decades while web video has struggled with finding a common useful metric.   TV advertisers have not found “views” or “uniques” to be an acceptable replacement for the GRP.

Many have struggled to convert the GRP metric to web video.  But the small size of the web audence has frustrated agencies trying to make apples to apples comparisons.  The reach and frequency achieved in one TV boradcast can take weeks or months to acheive online.

But converting to a web audience, which is smaller and more splintered than TV, is difficult. A TV campaign, for example, would achieve a rating in one TV broadcast; online, the equivalent reach and frequency may be achieved over weeks or months.

Mindshare and YuMe are not the only players to develop and online GRP equivalent.  Tremor Media has started reporting their own GRP equivalent for online campaigns using comScore data.  BBE is working on an online GRP metric with Starcom Mediavest, the media arm of Publicis.

The hope is the GRP equivalent will help online video firms tap the $70 million devoted annually to traditional TV advertising in the US.

Mindshare’s Cary Tilds, Senior VP-Digital Strategy describes the need for an online GRP equivalent:  “As viewing online viewing continues to grow, we need to have a clear understanding with the partners we work with on how to evaluate frequency models on broadband vs. TV”.

YuMe President Jayant Kadami says,  “We can now start to say, that the same million dollars you spent for the TV buy, you can have to run it for a month on these sites and you will get the equivalent.”

Carol Bartz is taking over from co-founder Jerry Yang, and among her first initiatives is a redo of Yahoo!’s approach to video.  Under Semel, Yahoo produced TV-like original series, but with little success.  The new plan calls for shorter and more targeted video series.  Among the new shows are “Spotlight to Nightlight,” which will feature famous mothers sharing humorous anecdotes about motherhood and fame.   Ali Landry,  a former Miss USA who is fluent in both English and Spanish will host and the hope is to attract a female audience.  Sponsor will be  State Farm Insurance.  State Farm had been looking for new ways to reach a female audience when it contacted Yahoo about a partnership, said Ed Gold, an advertising director for the insurance company. 

Yahoo! also has a series that features short recaps of prime-time television called “Primetime in No Time.” Yahoo! says the two- to five-minute-long show has an average of 400,000 daily streams, making it one of the most popular recurring series made for the Web.  The TV recaps are sponsored by Verizon Wireless.

Clearly, Yahoo!’s new model calls for pairing a targeted entertainment that can be married to corporate sponsors.  The old model, consisting of TV type programming such as talk shows and sitcoms “were all disasters,” accoring to Trip Chowdhry, a senior analyst for Global Equities Research.   That model was scrapped in 2006 and since then the portal has been quiet about its video intiatives.

Sibyl Goldman, Yahoo!’s head of entertainment, admitted that the old approach had not worked:  “We may have come at it from the wrong way in the previous era,” she said, adding,“The one-way model—‘We think this is great, we hope you come watch it’—may have been more of a TV mindset.”

TubeMogul offers a free service which video producers can use to upload their videos to over 20 video sharing sites. Once the video is live on those sites, TubeMogul can track views, comments and ratings (and for paying users TubeMogul can track demographics and other audience data). Illumenex has a suite of patent-pending tools that track user engagement with online videos. Among the aspects that are measured are how much of a video is watched, which are the most popular segments, when a viewer clicks away, and more. Metrics are available on an individual video basis as well as on a site-wide basis. Illumenenx is able to report on what sites video views are coming from, including referring sites and search terms.

TubeMogul currently has over 40,000 users, ranging from networks and studios such as CBS, to web only video producers and bloggers like “Fred.” Illumenex current clients include Internet TV pioneer Revision3 and comedy site “eBaum’s World.”

TubeMogul CEO Bret Wilson is excited about the combination. He says, “We have overlapping customers that need both distribution and analytics and a combined entity will solve both problems.” Jason Lopatecki, co-founder of Illumenex adds, “We are really two sides of the same product.”

YouTube has recently been pushing overlay ads which appear in the lower portion of the window while the video is playing. Since these ads are often used for branding purpose looking at click thru measurements would not give a true picture of their impact upon the advertisers brand messaging.

To prove the efficacy of these ads, Google hired a company called NeuroFocus to conduct research measuring biometric response to the overlays through indicators such as brainwave activity, skin response, and eye tracking. The study discovered that viewers found the overlays “compelling and engaging” and that these ads generated a high amount of attention and emotional engagement for a variety of different brands and video types. In addition, including a companion banner alongside the overlay ad was found to improve brand response compared to banner ads alone.

While the research is fascinating and provides the understanding of the possible impact of this form of advertising it raises the broader question of when biological response mechanisms will be used for ad metric and targeting. Recent news of “billboards that look back at you” indicates this future might not be that far away. For a recent Search event, participants were asked to predict the “Future of Search”. Bob, trying to be both humorous and provocative, predicted that Google would roll out “Dream Words” and “Dream Sense”, new products that allowed the search giant to serve ads into our dreams. Now that Google, with help from NeuroFocus, can offer an “eye dilation” score, are Dream Words and Dream Sense that far away?

This column written by Bob Heyman and Michael Andrew of Mediasmith in San Francisco. Bob Heyman is the Chief Search Officer and coined the terms “Audience Development” for building traffic to websites and “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). His new book, “Digital Engagement”, will be published in January by the publishing arm of the American Management Association. Michael Andrew is Director of Analytics. The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Jason Gambert asserts that he was the first to use the term SEO, in a 2007 email. The actual origin of SEO happened this way, as recounted way back in 1997 in the book Net Results that Leland and I wrote with Rick Bruner. Here’s an excerpt from page 137:

The scene is the Heyman home, the summer of 1995, 3:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. The phone rings. Bob, senior vice president of audience development at Cybernautics, grabs the receiver and mumbles, “Hello?”

“Why the #$%$ don’t we come up before page 4 on this damned thing? Page #$%$ 4, you #$%$ morons” the voice on the other end shouts.

Examining the alarm clock and smiling meekly at his wife, Bob asks, “Huh?”

The caller was the manager for the rock band Jefferson Starship, then a new Cybernautics client. He was throwing a tantrum befitting a rock industry insider in the middle of the night over the fact that the Web site Cybernautics had recently built for the band appeared several screens down in a search of “Jefferson Starship” on a particular search engine.

As it turns out, the band was on the road, and the manager had wanted to show a club promoter how hip Starship was to have its own web site. Unfortunately he couldn’t remember the URL (www.jstarship.com, now defunct), so he resorted to a search engine lookup. To his considerable annoyance, the page did not come up especially close to the top of the list.

The next morning, Bob dragged into the office a bit sleepier than usual, gathered the staff and explained that mastering the art of search engine ranking was a new company priority.

It turned out that what governed organic search results back then was how many times the keyword appeared on the web page. The Cybernautics designers had done a tasteful job and the keyword Jefferson Starship did not appear as often as it did on fan pages about the band. Once Bob had his designers have the words Jefferson Starship recur on the page in tiny black print against a black background the page rank vaulted to number one. The band was pleased.

Bob and Leland Harden called this new field Search Engine Optimization and soon thereafter hired the first SEOM (Search Engine Optimization Manager). And so SEO was born.

So, clearly, Jason Gambert’s claim of coining SEO in 2007 is patently spurious. Here are links to various posts about Gambert’s Trademark claim and the ensuing furor:

From TechDirt: Internet Marketer Tries To Trademark SEO

From SEOMoz: Pulling A Fast One

You can access the current status of Gambert’s Trademark filing here.

Bob Heyman is Chief Search Officer at Mediasmith in San Francisco. Bob’s new book (with Leland Harden). “Digital Engagement”, will be published by the American Management Association’s publishing arm in January.

RedLasso was a video search engine in the business of recording TV shows and indexing the clips so that users could find and embed them on other websites, principally blogging sites. Launched in November 2007, RedLasso says it received 24 million unique visits in April 2008. This service was being offered without the permission of the rights holders. RedLasso suspended access to its video search-and-clipping site two days after NBC Universal and Fox filed a copyright suit against them.

“We are very disappointed in the actions of select networks,” RedLasso said in a statement. “We believe we have always acted within the law and have been respectful of the networks’ rights. Unfortunately, they have forced our hand and are denying the blogging community access to the Redlasso platform that beneficially tracks the usage of newsworthy clips across the Web,” said Ken Hayward, CEO of Redlasso.

RedLasso had long suggested that it was in talks to obtain licenses for the disputed content. In May, NBC Universal denied that it had any affiliation with RedLasso when the entertainment company sent a letter accusing RedLasso of “building a business based on the unauthorized syndication of [the content owners' shows].” RedLasso responded at the time by declaring that the company would “continue to make its site available for use by bloggers providing social commentary on newsworthy events as it continues to work towards cooperative, mutually beneficial arrangements with those and other content providers.” Simultaneously, RedLasso announced the appointment of former CBS chief Michael Jordan as an adviser.

The NBC/Fox lawsuit stated that, despite the May cease and desist letters, that “nevertheless, RedLasso has made, and continues to make, unauthorized copies of the networks’ copyrighted programming and content around the clock every day.”

In an emailed statement, RedLasso said it “has no alternative but to suspend blogger access to its video search and clipping beta site for the immediate future. The company will continue to operate and provide services to its business and Radio To Web clients such as Greater Media and XM Satellite Radio.”

Clearly the networks are not going to allow upstarts like RedLasso to remarket their content when they have millions invested themselves in services like Hulu. It is clear, once again, that the law does apply to the internet.

Bob Heyman is the Chief Search Officer at Mediasmith in San Francisco, and coined the terms “Audience Development” for building traffic to websites and “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

The local TV stations include WPXI in Pittsburgh and WJZ in Baltimore. Yidio.com has a feature that automatically detects user location and displays local news instantly. Users can change their location and radius, which allows local videos of their choice to be displayed. Yidio claims to be the first to market with localization technology for videos.

Adam Eatros, Yidio’s president, asserts that “the local video angle is an interesting option for us, because local companies could serve pre-roll ads, how-to videos, or even sponsor a whole channel just for users in their area.” Eatros thinks that there is a great opportunity in video search, saying, “There’s no real big name that’s doing video search well yet,” and “What better time is there to jump in?”

Yidio is making a major effort to acquaint users with Boolean search, offering a “crash course” as well as listing all the search parameters on the Help page. The site is not currently focused on monetization, according to Eatros, though it does run AdSense video and text ads.

Brandon Eatros, Adam’s brother and co-founder, says, “It was our goal with Yidio.com to provide an all-in-one solution for users to find and watch any video on the internet quickly and easily. We wanted to simplify the lives of our users while producing a value-added service that would be beneficial to everyone.”

Bob Heyman is the Chief Search Officer at Mediasmith in San Francisco, and coined the terms “Audience Development” for building traffic to websites and “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). His new book, “Digital Engagement,” will be published in January by the publishing arm of the American Management Association. The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Blinkx has signed online advertising deals with three TV programmers, including the creator of the popular children’s TV show Barney And Friends. The revenue-sharing deals are with HIT Entertainment, Channel 5 Broadcasting in London, and Cheflive. They involve displaying contextual ads with online video that will be searchable and viewable on Blinkx. In addition, Blinkx signed similar ad deals with web sites Kitchen Caravan and Savory Cities. HIT Entertainment offers TV programming in more than 240 countries. Along with Barney the purple dinosaur, HIT also produces Bob The Builder, Thomas And Friends, and Fraggle Rock.

Blinkx’s deal with Channel 5 is to display ads on highlights from 5 News. The search engine has the same ad arrangement with Las Vegas-based Cheflive, which features cooking tips and tricks from chefs working in the gambling city. Kitchen Caravan features an online cooking show that highlights foods from around the world, while Savory Cities is an online video restaurant guide featuring profiles on top restaurants in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle.

I had a chance to interview Blinkx co-founder Suranga Chandratillake. He notes that Blinkx has hosted content from day one and that video search remains the central focus. Blinkx describes itself as the largest video search engine, with 18 million hours of indexed online video and audio content. They use advanced speech-recognition technology to analyze videos and claim to deliver search results that are more accurate than standard metadata-based keyword searches. Blinkx is powered by Autonomy’s Idol software, which indexes words and images within video, as well as associated tags.

Blinkx has leveraged their technology to launch AdHoc, a contextual video advertising platform that places contextually-relevant, clickable text ads in a bar above the web video being watched. The ability to place relevant ads utilizes the company’s powerful speech to text translation technology to create an on-the–fly transcript and to then match relevant ads to the words. Ads appear as words are spoken. Suranga believes this technology is superior to competitors who just look at tags and surrounding text to classify a video. While Blinkx utilizes those techniques as well, the AdHoc system even allows Blinkx to match ads to related concepts extracted from the video, not just to the words alone.

Blinkx has also announced the availability of Blinkx BBTV. Leveraging Blinkx’s speech recognition technology, BBTV automatically creates a speech track of the video, allowing users to search through content, literally word-for-word, and jump to specific points in a program, simply by searching for a spoken word.

The service launched with a library of premium independent films and a variety of programming from existing partners. BBTV is a small download (0.5 MB) that is available free of charge at www.blinkx.com. It features hybrid peer-to-peer streaming and a point-and-click channel interface. BBTV enables users to instantly browse or interact with online sources related to what they are watching, whether it’s Google, Wikipedia, IMDB, or other web sites offering relevant information. Users can “shift-click” on a word in the speech track for additional information on a person, location, or object within the video.

Suranga says that “broadband Internet connections are fast enough today that with the right technology, it’s possible to deliver an experience that’s equal in quality to television.” He adds that “the Web is the largest repository of connected information in the world – on any subject and from myriad sources. BBTV delivers television over the Internet, but it also fuses that TV with the wealth of information on the Web, rather than appearing as just another layer floating above it.”

With AdHoc, BBTV, and some major programming deals, Blinkx surely continues to “keep on keepin’ on.”

Bob Heyman is the Chief Search Officer at Mediasmith in San Francisco, and coined the terms “Audience Development” for building traffic to websites and “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.