TV Guide now has a search engine for finding video content at http://video.tvguide.com/ . This search engine is focusing on “professional content” — trailers, etc. — so while that will get you more focused it means that you won’t get the chicken police, the David Blaine parody where the guy gets Cheez-Its in his soda cup, etc.

Actually despite the fact that this IS a search engine, it’s very browsable. A Nav on the left lets you go through popular videos, picks, etc. — even a list of videos broken out by TV show. (American Idol has over 2300 videos; the search engine claims to over video content for over 13,000 shows.) You can also browse by network, celebrity, etc.

The search engine is simple keyword; I did a search for parody and actually got 72 results. Results were everything from MadTV to a CNN story to several results for some short online offering called “Monkey’d Minutes”. Once you’ve searched you can do another keyword search within results, or narrow your search down to just clips or complete shows (when I tried narrowing down my search to complete shows I narrowed it down a LOT. Bear in mind, though, that the video search engine appears to try to determine whether an item is a clip or not by length — several Jimmy Kimmel parodies that were complete were denoted as clips.)

Results come from a variety of places, from iTunes, iFilm, network sites, etc. Some of the site were free, some were pay. Obviously searching for full-length episodes you’ll find a lot more pay sites. I did an experiment, however; several people at work really like Heroes and have been encouraging me to watch it. I did a search for Heroes here and found many free episodes and clips at NBC, as well as many paid episodes at iTunes. I suppose if I can’t wait for the box set to come out in August…

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