Exalead, which is a great search engine but doesn’t get enough attention from my brain cells, has added a new application to its offerings — video search. The latest search is available at http://www.exalead.com/ .

Exalead’s Web search, according to the bottom of the home page, searches over 8 billion Web pages. The video part searches over four million clips from a variety of sites including YouTube, Dailymotion, and IFILM.

You can do a simple keyword search with Exalead, but you can also do an advanced search, and THIS is why I need to keep Exalead more to the front of my brain. Exalead’s advanced search options include stemming (putting a wildcard in a string to find all iterations of that string; messag* finds messages, message, messaged, etc.) phonetic and approximate spelling, a NEAR syntax, and, for crying out loud, regular expressions.

Video-specific syntax allow you to filter by video length, number of votes the item got, or the number of times it’s been viewed.

So let’s say I’m bored and I want to find really good Line Rider videos. I want ones that are at least 45 seconds long and have at least 1,000 views. I do a search like this: “line rider” length>45 viewed>1000 . That search gets me about 740 results. Results include a screen shot, brief description, ratings, and date it was added. (You have the option to see additional information on the results page, like tags and categories.) You can sort results by date, relevance, most-viewed, and highest-rated. There’s even a little tag cloud on the results page if you want to branch off into different searches. The only complaint I have is that there doesn’t seem to be an RSS feed available for the search results. To see the video, just click on the title; you’ll be taken to the Web site.

Of course the ability to search by length isn’t very unusual, but I really like the ability to search for video by views and votes, not to mention all the advanced search options that Exalead offers to start with. Exalead, I hereby grant you many more of my brain cells. Make good use of them.

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