New: Topsy Launches Real-Time Video Search

Topsy has just launched a new search engine that surfaces hot videos that are being shared on Twitter. The company announced Topsy video search this afternoon via its Twitter account.

The new video search functions similarly to Topsy’s other search tools — web (links), tweets and photos. Results appear to be ranked based on several factors, including how often, how recent, and who shares the video on Twitter. The left column offers a number of filtering and sorting options.

Those search results are pretty good; I found a few Japan-related videos that I hadn’t seen yet despite having Twitter open all day the past two days.

Topsy isn’t the first real-time video search engine around. TweetMeme continues to offer video search, and OneRiot used to offer it, too. That was before OneRiot shut down its entire search engine and passed its search partners to … Topsy. Google doesn’t (yet) offer a video filter on its Realtime search, just one for images.

But, with many real-time search engines struggling and/or shutting down altogether (i.e., Collecta, CrowdEye, and others), Topsy may eventually become the default and even the last real-time search engine standing.