Video Crawler - A Multimedia Search Engine

Video Crawler is AT&T's multimedia search engine. The service is currently in Beta and provides access to videos and other multimedia files of more than 1600 different websites including the popular ones like Youtube, MySpace or Dailymotion.

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.

Update: Video Crawler is no longer available. I suggest you use Google Video Search instead to search for and browse videos that you are interested in. It may not offer the same interface as AT&T's abandoned solution, but it nevertheless works, and that is all that counts in the end.

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