A number of articles and blogs have noted AOL’s recent launch of Truveo. The new destination site proclaims, “Truveo’s mission is to improve the quality of video search so that you can always find the right video to watch.” Why launch a new, destination site? Truveo founder and CEO Tim Tuttle contends,

“Video on the Web is no longer about user-generated content on sites like YouTube. There are now a lot of quality sites with other videos.”

Tuttle explains that Truveo is trying to bring that quality content to consumers.

Truveo was founded in 2004 to power search on other web sites. AOL purchased the search engine in 2006. The decision to launch Truveo.com outside of the AOL brand has people wondering about AOL’s goals and strategy for the site.

Much like Google, Truveo utilizes the metadata text linked with video clips to search across the Web. Truveo distinguishes itself with its use of multiple searching techniques, including a “page inspection” that looks at the Web page by page to identify videos.

While the site is well designed, it still seems to be an incremental improvement rather than revolutionary, as Truveo still indexes essentially only titles and tags. The analogy would be to imagine someone building a web search engine today that indexed only document titles and not the page content. The other peculiar part of AOL’s strategy here is the fact that the rest of the search market is moving towards a universal search experience rather than a vertical search experience, mainly because users don’t do vertical search in any large numbers. They expect the “web search” box to deliver them all the relevant content, regardless of format, in response to their query. Nonetheless the online video market continues to evolve at a rapid pace.