Announcing: New Search and Video Lookup APIs May 14, 20098:05 UTC

Do you have a website with videos on it? Do you want to hack some new features into your homegrown DVR? Do you want to add contextually related videos from around the web on your site? Do you want to create a revolutionary, new UI for searching and browsing videos? If you answered yes to any of those questions, or if you’ve got an innovative use for VideoSurf’s unique video metadata and search results, then we’ve got something for you.

We’re very happy to announce the release of two brand new APIs for public use.

1. Video Search API – Perform any query and retrieve relevant videos. Highlights include:
   • Ability to refine search result sets by people that appeared in the videos (e.g. find the episode of Friends where Brad Pitt guest starred)
   • Include/exclude results by video provider (e.g. filter out Youtube videos or only show Comedy Central videos)
   • Refine results by content type (e.g. show only Full TV Episodes or exclude slideshows)
   • For each video, get back VideoSurf’s unique visual summary, related topics, an intelligently selected thumbnail and more
2. Video Lookup API – Retrieve detailed information about specific videos. Highlights include:
   • Lookup by VideoSurf video id or by the source url (e.g. Get VideoSurf’s visual summary for a Youtube or Hulu video using its url)
   • For each video, get back VideoSurf’s unique visual summary, related topics, an intelligently selected thumbnail and more

Our popular Videos at a Glance Firefox Extension is built on top of the Video Lookup API and is just one example of the usefulness of such a lookup service. Think Greasemonkey.

To see the search API in action, you can visit these pages from our friends at The Car Connection and Kosmix.

If you’re ready to dig in, there are a couple of examples that will help you get started. For more information and the full documentation, please visit our API Overview.

If you build something cool with these APIs please let us know so that we can show off your work on our API examples page. Thanks!