Truveo’s video search engine provides the most comprehensive results of any major search engine online, according to an extensive study conducted by the search engine team. The study, conducted in August, looked at how well Truveo, Blinkx, Google Video, Microsoft Live Video Search and Yahoo! Video Search covered the top 100 Alexa-rated news, sports, TV, music and movie sites that have video content. The study showed that Truveo covered 86 of those sites; Blinkx covered 20; Microsoft Live Video Search covered 17; Google Video covered three and Yahoo! Video Search covered two.

Truveo conducted this coverage test itself because currently no major testing organization, publication or consulting firm is publicly conducting ongoing quality studies of video search engines. Truveo believes that while coverage tests can be conducted in an objective manner, relevancy-testing needs to be conducted by an independent third party due to the subjective nature of some of the judging. In order to encourage ongoing video search testing by an independent organization, which will help all video search engines improve and will help consumers choose a video search engine, Truveo is making its methodology publicly available.

Test Methodology

The test, which consisted of over 5,000 individual queries, looked at each search engine to determine how well it covered the top 100 Alexa-rated news, sports, TV, music and movie websites that have video content.

To develop the list of 100 websites Truveo selected the top 100 Alexa-ranked video content websites with the highest traffic rank (as recorded on August 6, 2008) for each of the following categories: news, sports, TV, music and movies. These five lists were combined and sorted by traffic rank. Sites were then checked to ensure they had a reasonable number of videos and were appropriate for the study. The top 100 sites on this list were then selected for testing.

Then, the study selected 10 representative videos from each of the websites and queried each search engine for each video. If a search engine returned at least five of the 10 representative videos, it was counted as covering that website. Because the test was designed to measure coverage, the search engine needed to return the exact video from the original site in order to be counted. The queries were run between August 8, 2008 and August 28, 2008.