AOL launches new Video Search, still can’t find any real porn

AOL launched its latest version of AOL Video Search this past Wednesday (via InformationWeek). It has certainly come a long way in the last two years, since it’s original launch in November 2003, but, no surprise — since it’s AOL — you still can’t find any real porn with it (as opposed to, say, Yahoo! Video Search where you can find some porn) To be fair, you can’t find any real porn using Google Video Search, either, and Microsoft’s MSN doesn’t even seem to have a video search, yet.

Certainly, this strategy appeals to a mostly family-friendly subscription audience, but it’s tough to admit that it is also the limiting factor that will keep AOL from becoming a top contender in the online search space. It’s tough to admit that the reason why they’re only one-third the audience of Yahoo is because that other two-thirds of Yahoo’s audience are mature adults, not children. AOL is still clinging to an outmoded strategy that undesirably constrains the potential audience it can capture. Google knows this, so they offer SafeSearch to filter out adult content from search results. If AOL wants to really grow its web audience, it’s going to need to consider a similar strategy, or resign itself to remaining less popular than services that do offer value to mature audiences.

Interestingly, AOL Search for “new aol video search” didn’t make finding this announcement easy — matter of fact, what it displayed at the top of the page before the search results were two video links to the recent news about three children in New Jersey that went missing and then were found dead in the trunk of a car — yikes. Compare this to Google’s search for “new aol video search” which had a link to the launch announcement (the InformationWeek link I provided earlier) at the top of the page, before the regular search results. See the following screenshots (click either image to see the full-sized version):

AOL Search

Google

All this aside, AOL’s Video Search product is still a very high quality offering, and stands a good chance of being #1 in the audio/video search vertical. This is good news for AOL and could be a winning strategy. We’ll see.

One more thought: it’s rumored that various audio/video search products are using or will use voice recognition software on the assets to build more relevant search results. I can’t wait to see a search product that lets me search podcasts and videoblogs using search terms and return me audio/video where those words were spoken, or where the dialog is relevant to my search terms. Killer app. potential.

Tags:
video search,
porn,
news,
new media,
AOL,
AOL Search,
Google,
Yahoo,
MSN