Pandia takes a look at the search engine coverage of the last week and adds some comments about video search.

The tremendous growth of broadband connectivity has made online video watching possible, at least for the short YouTube type clips.

Many web sites — especially in the Web 2.0 sphere — have understood that video content does attract visitors. Fanpop, a social web site we cover in one of our articles this week, put more and more emphasis on letting user contribute and link to videos.

There are a lot of videos out there, and finding the right one is becoming increasingly difficult. One of the main problems is that videos are so much harder to index than plain text. Originally video search engines made use of captions or sub-titles, i.e. text embedded in the video files.

The two video search platforms we cover this week also try to analyse the soundtrack of the file, deciphering speech. Ultimately they will probably also try to analyze the images found in the videos, trying to identify persons and scenery.

The possible use of all this information is mind blowing. Take a look at our vision of media search in 2015 for one possible scenario.

This week at Pandia

Podzinger search engine becomes Everyzing
The X Change Web Analytics Conference
Sproose, video search with a human touch
Fanpop, a growing Web 2.0 community

This week’s search engine headlines from around the Web

Who's afraid of Google
The Economist covers Google with a long feature article (Aug 30 2007)

An Insider's View Of Google Universal Search
Google’s David Bailey, who heads the team working on Universal Search, tells his story over at Search Engine Land (Aug 31 2007)

Easy Way to Find Recent Web Pages
Use Google Advanced Search to find the web pages first indexed in the past day, week, month or in the past 2 months. (Google OS Aug 30 2007)

Yahoo! & Google Announce Updates to Search Marketing Platforms
Yahoo! is now sending out notifications when ad quality scores drop. Google has updated the AdWords Report Center interface to look more like Google Analytics. (Internet Marketing Monitor Aug 31 2007)

Searching for Better Health
Ask.com partners with Healthline Networks to provide Health Smart Answers (Ask Official Blog Aug 27 2007)

What’s Hot — Or At Least Hotly-Contested — On Wikipedia
Wikirage tracks the Wikipedia entries with the most edits per unique editor over given periods of time. (ResearchBuzz Aug 29 2007)

Google News Makes Sorting Change, Now Hosting News
Google News has announced that it is removing duplicates of articles from search results, now going back and providing the original article. (ResearchBuzz Sept 1 2007)

Google Shift on Handling of News
Google is playing host to articles from four news agencies, including The Associated Press setting the stage for it to generate advertising revenue from Google News. (New York Times Sept 1 2007)

Using The Hidden Flight Simulator in Google Earth
A working (albeit first version) flight simulator is included in the just-released Google Earth 4.2. (Google Tutor Aug 31 2007)

Google release their own Facebook App…
App allows users to conduct a Google search from within Facebook and then choose to share the results with their friends through their mini feed. (Tamar Aug 28 2007)

George Reyes To Retire As Google CFO
Google press release of Aug 28 2007: The Chief Financial Officer leaves.

Nokia Hits Back With Rival Music Service
Today the Finnish company will launch a worldwide music download service to rival Apple’s iTunes. (Marketing Pilgrim Aug 29 2007)

Dmoz Extortion
An Open Directory editor has apparently tried to blackmail Shoemoney to pay or loose his spot in the directory. This is bad. (26. Aug 2007)

Google Web Toolkit leaves beta
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) works by converting Java into JavaScript, and shielding developers from browser-specific issues (iTWire Aug 29 2007)

Scoble Predicts Google Death By Facebook
He boldly outlines a Future Search engine combination of Facebook-Techmeme-Mahalo technology that will spell doom for Google (SE Watch Aug 27 2007)

GoogleBot Understands Comments
"I am personally against the nofollow tag. It’s one of the most absurd ideas to come out of the search engines in a long time." Jeremy Luebke at Marketing Pilgrim (Aug 27 2007)

27% of the Top 100 Internet Retailers Still Missing the Boat on SEM
Oneupweb has analyzed the top 100 Internet retailers to see how well optimized their web sites are (Search Engine Guide Aug 28 2007)

New York Times Archives Causing Google Reputation Nightmares
Now that more of the NYT’s archives are appearing in Google’s search results, many individuals are finding their past is catching up with them. (Marketing Pilgrim Aug 28 2007)