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Pixsy offers video search for the people

Start-up lets Web sites and blogs embed customized video and image searches.

Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.
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Elinor Mills
Search engine start-up Pixsy is offering a way for Web sites and blogs to embed customized video and image search into their sites.

Under the Pixsy Power syndication service, a golf Web site could, for example, put a search engine on its site that grabs only video or images tagged with sports-related keywords such as "golf" or "Tiger Woods," said Chase Norlin, Pixsy co-founder and chief executive.

The site could then make additional revenue off ads related to the search, he said. The results page is hosted by Pixsy, which then shares a percentage of the ad revenue.

Pixsy avoids any copyright issues by displaying only thumbnails of the images and video images in the results and thumbnails have been ruled by a court as a "fair use" of copyright material, Norlin said.

Pixsy also distributes its search engine to publisher Web sites. For instance, on Tuesday, Pixsy announced a deal to power the video search on portal EVTV1.com.

Online video search is one of the hottest areas, as evidenced by Google's $1.65 billion stock acquisition of popular video-sharing site YouTube last week.