Read the following before you start complaining that it surely is like all the other video search engines out there: Microsoft Live Video Search has a very interesting preview features. If you hover the mouse over a video it will play a 30 second long preview of that video in the box that was occupied by the video thumbnail.

This is an excellent way of previewing many videos in short time without having to load them on separate pages. This is not only working on video search results pages but also on single video pages when hovering over related videos.

This instant preview feature speeds up the process of finding relevant videos. There are not really any other features worth meaning, Microsoft seems to have kept it as simplistic as possible.

The search engine is indexing the contents of those websites and providing a search engine so that users can search all sites for multimedia content at once. The search results are therefor a combination of all multimedia portals. Results can be filtered by media type (video, audio, radio, games..) and sorted by factors like popularity, relevancy or rating.

Content that has been selected will be played in the main interface which uses independent blocks that can be moved around. It is for instance possible to search for additional videos while one is already playing. The multimedia content is simply embedded in the site which means that the basic controls of the site’s players is available.

One major nuisance of the multimedia search engine is that only four results are displayed per page which could mean some serious page flipping when searching for popular terms.

Registered users receive additional options like the ability to save or embed multimedia files or build a personal multimedia collection. The service is showing promise. It’s a little bit slow when it comes to displaying results to the user which quickly becomes annoying considering that only four results per page are displayed.

On the other hand: If you are looking for a way to search hundreds of sites for multimedia content you might want to give Video Crawler a try.