Friedbeef’s Tech

Internet users in the U.S. watched 12.7 billion online videos in November, an increase of 34 percent versus a year ago.  With that many videos available for viewing, it’s no surprise that search is becoming increasingly important.  Here are 7 different free ways to search and find the most relevant videos.

1. The best way to search YouTube with thumbnails

Inspired by compfight the Flickr search engine (which I love),  Wibe7.tv is a mosaic based search which displays a huge number of thumbnails on screen so you can do a quick visual search.  If you need more information, just hover your cursor over an image, and a description will appear. 

2. How to use freeware to speed up your searches

With Ashampoo Clipfinder, you can find and immediately download videos from YouTube, Veoh, Google Video, sevenload, Dailymotion, MySpace, MyVideo, ClipFish, and many more at the click of a mouse. 

3. How to search and avoid fake videos

Do a search for any popular subject and you may find yourself baited by spammers or pranksters who litter online video sites with fake videos.  One way to weed them out when you do a search is to use Videosurf.  What this gives you is a set of time-series thumbnails for the search results, so you can peer within the videos and can decide whether or not to load up the video.

4. How to search multiple sites at once

Many sites crawl and search multiple video sites but few do it as well as Purevideo.  This service goes beyond traditional video sites and crawls practically everything which has a video.  Arranged and categorized well, this is a great stop if you want to find videos.

5. How to add YouTube Search directly to Firefox

Firefox comes with a one-click solution where if you look at the search box at the top right of your screen, and see a glowing arrow, you can add search engines to the list.  So all you need to do it go to YouTube.com, and you’ll be able to click on the arrow and add YouTube video search.  From then on, you’ll be able to search within YouTube from the Firefox search box.

6. The quick and dirty way to search YouTube

YouTube Fastsearch is a homebrew webpage which uses a script to search and retrieve YouTube pages.  It works better than the original YouTube search engine for two reasons.  One, you can mouse over any video, and it will quick preview by showing you images within the video (this is another great way to avoid fake videos).  Two, you can watch the videos directly from the search page saving you the bandwidth of having to load up a fresh page every time you want to see another video. 

7. The coolest way to search YouTube

Cooliris has got to be the sexiest most elegant way to search YouTube.  Available for Firefox, IE7, Safari, it’s hard for me to do justice to the interface by describing it in text, so here’s a video of it in action :)

How do you search for videos online?  Tell us in the comments!