The move comes amid dwindling subscription revenue for AOL and a concerted effort by the company to boost its free content offering in order to raise advertising revenue.
It’s also the latest move by another sizable player in the online world to make video content more accessible. Yahoo, MSN and Google have all touted enhanced video services in the last few months, including the much-touted Google Video service launched last month, which lets users both store and access amateur and professional videos for free.
Google also recently announced deals to provide online broadcast services for CBS and the National Basketball Association.
None of these large players have focused on adult content, and Google Video bans “pornographic or obscene” content from Google Video outright, but Truveo’s search service has so far passed no moral judgment on what content is returned with its search services, meaning AOL could become far more effective at finding free porn in the coming months.
Using a technology the company calls “visual crawling,” Truveo’s system scours the Internet for video files, returning results based on both the name of the file as well as surrounding text on a given page.
Reviews of the service have consistently ranked Truveo as more effective than Google when it comes to finding video, which may explain why rumors surfaced last month that Google also was interested in buying the company.
