Pixsy Has High Hopes For Video Search

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August 18, 2006 (7:25 PM EDT)

By Laurie Sullivan , TechWeb Technology News

Search engine Pixsy Corp. next week will launch a site that hunts the Web for celebrity photos, a company executive said Friday.

The new service, Starhabit.com, aims to become the largest aggregator of videos and still photos, from Mel Gibson to Samuel L. Jackson to Tiger Woods.

It is an RSS-based site that updates as news posts. It will offer advanced browsing and sorting functions, and an AJAX interface, said Chase Norlin, Pixsy CEO.

"The site can locate a couple hundred thousand photos and videos, and growing, just for the celebrity service," he said. "It's all the latest images. If something happened to a celebrity a minute ago, you'll catch it at Starhabit." Seattle-based Pixsy, which Time magazine this week named Pixsy to the list of the "50 Coolest Websites" of 2006, also plans to eventually launch a gateway service called "PixsyPower, that Norlin bills as a "create-your-own custom photo and video search engine. It will create the engine for you in minute."

Pixsy targets small companies or individuals that may want to add video and photo search capabilities to blogs, wikis or social network pages.

In a related study from the Online Publishers Association earlier this year, 58 percent of consumers said they rely on a small set of video sites to find content. There is a huge potential market for video search with the "dizzying proliferation of video content," said Anthony Iaffaldano, marketing director at search engine marketing firm Reprise Media.

"Having the ability to search for video on a blog would be very interesting because the nature of the blog is to share information in and share information out," said Peter Kim, senior analyst at Forrester Research. Kim contributes to a blog at the research firm.

PixsyPower is expected to run a shared ad revenue model. Building out visual search, Pixsy will brush up against rivals, such as Google Inc., that built its business on search engine technology and then figured out how to generate profits by distributing it on sites across the Internet with AdSense and SiteSearch.

"Google has begun to offer video search, but the way Pixsy is attempting to catalog all the video on the Web seems rather advanced," said Emily Riley, JupiterResearch advertising analyst.