Truveo, a start-up company emerging from stealth mode, launched a new video search engine that delivers higher quality and more up-to-the-minute results than traditional search engines. Based on a unique technology for indexing video using the visual characteristics of web pages, the Truveo search engine can find video on the Web that all other search engines miss.

Truveo released a beta version of its search product . While the development of Truveo's unique crawling technology has taken nearly two years, Truveo has only recently put this new technology into production and has already indexed an extensive collection of video that cannot be found with current search engines. On its site, Truveo invites users to compare its results against those of Google and Yahoo! In the next six months, the company expects to significantly improve the breadth and quality of its search listings.

"Despite many years of development, video search engines are scarcely better than the original video search engines introduced a decade ago," said Tim Tuttle, co-founder and CEO of Truveo. "For search to reach the next level and become truly ubiquitous, a fundamentally new approach is required to rapidly find and organize the vast amounts of television, movie and video content created every minute. At Truveo, our mission is to build an engine that indexes all of the video on the web, giving users the most relevant and up-to-date results for any video search, be it the latest on Hurricane Katrina or Britney Spears."

Truveo was started by Tim Tuttle and Adam Beguelin, veteran search and networking technologists. In early 2004, they began development of a technology, called the "Visual Crawler," which is the foundation of the Truveo search engine.

Truveo's "Visual Crawler" is capable of identifying the visual characteristics of a web application, as a human would. Using this approach, the crawler is able to locate video that is normally invisible to standard crawlers. Additionally, once the "Visual Crawler" locates a video, it can also find an abundance of contextual information, or metadata that relates to each video. Due to the ability to mine this rich metadata, when a user types a query into Truveo, such as "Lance Armstrong," the search engine can return the most relevant and up-to-the-minute videos on Armstrong's latest developments.