Among the sites indexed by VideoCrawler are the usual suspects like Hulu, blip.tv, MySpace Video, Google Video, and YouTube, though VideoCrawler also indexes presentations on SlideShare. We also noticed a large number of videos from newspaper and personal web sites. At the same time, however, our searches did not return any videos from sites like Revver, Vimeo, or Veoh.

More Than Just Video

One interesting feature of VideoCrawler is that it also allows you to restrict your searches to podcasts, Internet radio, TV shows, slideshows, and ringtones. This takes Videocrawler a step beyond most of its competitors and turns it into a more fully featured media search engine as opposed to just a video search engine, though, given its name, video search and aggregation seems to be the primary mission of VideoCrawler.

Overall, searching on Videocrawler worked quite well and it generally returned relevant results for our test searches.

Why AT&T is getting into this business is still not quite clear to us, but VideoCrawler is a worthwhile alternative to other video search engines, and will become even more so once it starts crawling a few more video sharing sites like Vimeo or Viddler.

The Mefeedia interface could use some work; it's not very pretty and there are a few logical connections from one part of the site to another that haven't been made. We could complain all day about anything, though. Mefeedia is now a better media search engine than probably any other available.

That list, from the company's blog post announcing the launch of search, is best seen in action by doing some searches there. While the vast majority of video search goes on at YouTube, there's no reason to exclude the more artistic content available on Vimeo or the international content at DailyMotion.

Mefeedia isn't doing any fancy speech-to-text analysis or probably anything other than searching titles, description and tag fields - but that's ok. Other services that leverage heavy technology for media search (like Blinkx or Everyzing) may be good for high-stakes reputation tracking, but as a user I just want an extensive index and a good user experience. Mefeedia isn't all full of Flash that slows down my browser.

The best things about Mefeedia besides the new search are the playlists, subscriptions and community features the site has always offered. As you might guess from the name, there are RSS feeds all over the site - which is great. Mefeedia has a healthy little audience taking advantage of those features. You may want to check them out when stopping by to search the big media index. More than anything I wish the service could look at my viewing history and recommend particular items, people and playlists to me.

Interface Problems

The thing that may keep you from making a regular home at Mefeedia is that the interface is pretty atrocious. There's a lot of AJAX, which is nice, but the site is an undifferentiated mass of lines and white space, fields running over each other, ugly pop-up screens and "if only I could" near-misses in site navigation. Let's not even talk about the company's favicon, that zonked out old-school TV set. I think that speaks for itself.

Finally, it has to be said that Mefeedia's allowing users to consume whole gobs of other peoples' content in a player set next to ads for which they get no revenue is likely to irk some number of content publishers.

I've spent a few afternoons going through the Mefeedia community and playlists and have found some good stuff and I'm sure I'll be going back there regularly now that the site has established itself as a particularly good place to search for media.