A new way to 'Dabble' in online video

YouTube. Google Video. Not to mention all those sites that specialize in fuzzy clips of swimming pool mishaps and skateboarders falling off roofs. There are a lot of sources for online video out there, and no really effective way to aggregate all their content has emerged.

But now, a small start-up is trying to take over that niche. Lifehacker, the Gawker Media-owned tips-and-tricks blog, recently steered its readers to Dabble, a beta search engine that claims to be able to paw through data from nearly 250 video hosting sites, as well as a whole slew of independent sites, in order to find anything from Jessica Simpson's latest talk show appearance to (heaven forbid) all those "Numa Numa" remix videos.

Dabble also allows site members (registration is free) to "tag" videos, del.icio.us-style, as well as add new video feeds to the database.

I'm not quite sure what to think of Dabble quite yet; even though it can search almost 250 video sites, it doesn't necessarily have access to their full contents. My search for "Stephen Colbert" yielded only 75 videos, most of which were clips of the notorious White House Press Correspondants' Dinner speech, as well as a few recent additions to YouTube's arsenal. A YouTube search using the same query, on the other hand, came up with a whopping 501 results.

Dabble's got potential, but at this point, it's so new that it's impossible to tell.