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The AOL APIs: AOL Video Search

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The AOL Video Search Developer Center provides three different APIs for using AOL Video Search:

  • XML API: delivers XML-formatted video search results that can be easily incorporated into your web pages.
  • AJAX API: runs in the browser and lets client applications access video search results directly from JavaScript.
  • Flash API: runs in Macromedia Flash and lets client applications access video search results directly from Flash.

The XML API was previously known as the "REST API" but the development team decided that "XML API" was a more correct designation because the API is not sufficiently "RESTful." The Flash API is new.

Documentation for the Video Search APIs is well organized and readily accessible at the Video Search Developer Center. The center also includes a link to the SearchVideo.com demo application and an application gallery.

As you wander around the Video Search API site, you'll see the name "Truveo" popping up in various places. That's because AOL Video Search is indeed the application created by the former startup Truveo. Here's what Michael Arrington had to say shortly after Truveo's September 2005 launch:

If you are looking for video content, this is the place to go.

Founded two years ago by a seriously smart team of search experts, Truveo is tackling the very difficult problem of creating metadata from video out of whole cloth - unlike text-based content, it is very difficult to determine context of video and audio content without a human to actually view it (which is error prone and doesn't scale).

Truveo takes an innvoative two step approach to indexing new content. The first step is a straight web crawl to find the videos. The second, more important step, is to create metadata about the content, beyond what is available in transcripts and feeds (most video content has neither). They've created a "visual crawler" that looks at surrounding content to determine context.

The availability of the AOL Video Search APIs puts this capability into the hands of any developer or startup seeking to provide its users with what's very likely the most powerful video search platform on the planet.

Resources

I saw founder Tim Tuttle speak at last November's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. His presentation is availble within the "AOL Is Open: New Contexts, New Opportunities" PowerPoint slide set. You can also find the AOL Data Sheet (PDF) document on the dev.aol.com Resources tab.

Of course, the AOL Video Search Developer Center is your foundational reference for programming applications using the Video Search APIs. In addition, there are several excellent articles on dev.aol.com that provide tutorials, walking you through developing an AOL Video Search application:

A search for "AOL Video Search" on dev.aol.com will also bring up various blog posts regarding the Video Search APIs.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media

» Submitted by kevinfarnham1 on May 30, 2007 - 7:53am.