Center vs. Circumference

On December 5, 2005, three executives from video search engines spoke during the “Video Search” session moderated by Chris Sherman at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in Chicago:

• Suranga Chandratillake, the cofounder and CTO of blinkx
• John Thrall, head of multimedia search engineering at Yahoo! Search
• Karen Howe, vice president of AOL Search and general manager of Singingfish

Although it was still “early days” for video search, the panelists agreed that the best strategy for marketers was to optimize the video content on their websites to make it easier for the video search engines to find it and make it available to searchers seeking such content.

This meant that making your website the center of your online video strategy appeared to be the smart thing to do back in the “early days”—before YouTube.