The Sproose search engine has adopted the blinkx video search index and put its own voting system on top of it.

The Sproose video search engine uses the same database as the popular blinkx search tool. So far there is nothing extraordinary about it.

A democratic video search engine

However, Sproose has added its own “Digg-like” interface to video search, giving voting power to its registered members.

It goes like this:

Sign up for a free membership. Then vote for the results/pages/videos you like by clicking om a special icon found to the left of any search result listing. The icon will tell any visitor how many registered searchers have voted for this particular page or video.

You may also add a comment for others to read.

There is a link to the personal profile of the latest voter. There you can see all the pages or videos that person has voted for (unless he or she decides to keep this information private.

Then there is a a link to a list of all the comments related to one particular search result. The comment system actually allows for a discussion among Sproose members, turning it into a Web 2.0 community.

Voting influences the search algorithm

Furthermore, you may click on a spam removal link to avoid seeing that page again the next time you are searching. If a certain number of people click on the dustbin icon the page will be removed from the index.

“Sproose offers users a really creative way of having the community improve upon algorithmic search for both video content and web results,” says Bob Pack, CEO.

Indeed, the voting patters of the members do influence the search algorithm of all searchers, not only your own.

It seems that the votes are independent of the search query. In other words, if you search for “search engine tutorial” and gives a vote to the Pandia Goalgetter Web Search Tutorial, that page will get a boost for any relevant search term.

Doing a vanity web search (not video search) for “Pandia” we found that our own search rank as number 6, behind the Official Google Blog and Phil Bradley. Why? Because these sites have pages that refer to Pandia, and someone has voted for them.

Spam and click-fraud

Is it possible to spam this system? It is hard to say, as Sproose gives no information on how they will combat “click fraud” — i.e. people signing up for a large number of accounts in order to vote for their own pages.

We would guess that it would be fairly easy for Sproose to identify cheaters. A large number of new accounts voting for the same pages should get the alarms ringing. And you have to establish a large number of accounts, as one member can only vote for the same page once.

Still, if there are very few votes for a page (and there are in many areas), even one vote could make a difference, as the Pandia example so amply demonstrates. Still, we are not sure if Sproose has the traffic needed to make a “get your friends to click on your own site policy” worth while. Moreover, we hate spam, and we can’t be bothered.

We will keep an eye on Sproose. If this voting system do improve the search algorithm it may have a winner, because — ultimately — search result quality is what matters in this game.

The user interface

Apart from the voting system, there is nothing revolutionary about this site.

The search interface is uncluttered and Google-like, the search result pages divided into one section for each result, with a still “thumbnail” representing the video to the left.

blinkx adds live video to search result pages, which certainly looks cool, but does not really add much useful information in our opinion.

In short: The Sproose design is not exactly beautiful, but it certainly works for us.

Note that the blinkx/Sproose index has over fourteen million hours of video content available for searching. blinkx (and hence Sproose) uses a combination of conceptual search (i.e. searching text captions), speech recognition and video analysis software to identify relevant videos.