Google plans to unveil this summer a web-only video search engine that will allow users to preview clips from the website, anonymous sources told CNET. The service will offer up free video shorts (such as "Star Wars" spoofs) and will also let users watch about 10 seconds of video clips before forwarding visitors to the host sites. The new service will round out Google's current video search offering, which lets users search the closed-caption text of TV shows and preview stills.
Google is reportedly preparing for a paid video service and is talking to content providers to aggregate video and sell premium or pay-per-view access as well. "The ultimate endgame is streaming video, otherwise Google can't get video advertising dollars," one source told CNET.
Viewed as a valuable new medium for online advertising, video search has been heating up. Google, Yahoo and AOL's Singinfish have been expanding into videos in an effort to gain business from TV advertisers, and even Amazon's A9.com search unit, according to CNET's sources, is looking into videos. Unlike Yahoo, Google won't trawl the web for video and will use only clips submitted by the content producers.
