AOL, which is what I think tabloids would refer to a "troubled web giant", today brought its video search service Truveo to the UK market. Truveo trawls video sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe and the rest. Truveo was bought by AOL in a low-key deal in January last year.
Any search service has to come up against Google, which offers searches across all media and has the lion's share of consumer confidence in web search. Hitwise gives a rough indication of the state of UK search (though it bases its data on just one ISP, or so we believe) crediting Google with a 77% market share as of March this year. Yahoo are at 8%, MSN at 5% and Ask at 5%. Tough market to crack. So what's the offering?
Truveo is niche, indexing video only and maybe AOL will use it as a parasite service (I mean that in the technical, rather than derogatory way...) off the back of AOL customers who end up at the home page by default. While that's not quite as glamorous as being a destination in itself, we know that "being the home page" has done pretty well for some.
But Truveo also indexes some mainstream stuff, it says, including BBC, Sky News, The Sun, ITN and UEFA news. As the site is extended further across Europe and Asia the service will be localised in each territory, but it already claims to reach 40m unique users each month, according to comScore, and that's big.
Curiosities include the button under the search bar that asks users to click to decide if they want their search to return adult content or not, and the "most popular video on the web today" section that includes video from BBC News in January 2006. Weird.
Truveo does, however, return several It's a Knockout clips, which is always a good measure of quality.
Source: Release
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