With video content becoming so popular, is meta-search for video far behind? Of course not. One of the first contenders is PureVideo search, which provides both search across several different video providers as well as popularity charts for over 30 different video providers (YouTube, CNN, ESPN, BusinessWeek, etc.) It’s in beta at http://www.purevideo.com/ .

I am not sure how videos are getting indexed here — the announcement I got said the database was indexed by “both crawl and RSS”, which is great, but there’s plenty being missed. Case in point: I did a search for glaucoma. I got four results, from rootv, guba, YouTube, and Revver. I ran the same search at YouTube and got 19 results at YouTube alone. However the results I got at YouTube did not contain the result I got at PureVideo that purportedly CAME from YouTube. So bear in the mind that perhaps PureVideo’s indexing of YouTube and other resources is not complete.

I ran some other searches that ended up focusing a lot on YouTube content and found listings that had at one point been on YouTube but had been removed for unspecified reasons — I would suppose during a purge of copyrighted content.

If you get past the indexing weirdness and the unavailability weirdness, PureVideo turns out decent results, with decent summaries and thumbnails. Search results are also available in RSS format. Visitors are invited to submit individual videos or an RSS feed of several videos.

But there are other things I’d like to see. I’d like a source list. I’d like to get some idea how things are being indexed here. And I’d like that the help link from the front page goes to an actual help page, instead of an e-mail address.