Lumerias A Minimalistic Search Engine For Videos

Duisburg based Lumerias is a recently launched search engine for videos. The name pays tribute to french brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière who invented the portable motion picture camera.

Lumerias crawles all major video sharing sites, processes most video formats and indexes the title, description, tags and other extractable information. The current index holds about seven million searchable videos. This enables the seach Lumerias’ users to find videos from all kinds of sources.

Now there are literally hundreds of possibilities for searching for videos available targeting various information or entertainment needs, where Lumerias really shines is its minimalism, think Google 1998. The results are displayed fast and distraction free.

Videos can be watched inline or downloaded if possible.

It is a little annoying that hardly any preview image is avaiable yet and I am missing some sense of how the videos are ranked. Filtering the results by various criteria would be useful too. Lumerias is in active development though and

Over the next months a number of innovations will improve the quality of search results. Lumerias.com’s team is busy developing algorithms to automatically make sense of the indexed videos’ image data and to transcribe their content. These techniques will then be put to use to further supplement the index which will hold over ten million videos in its next phase.

Lumerias also provides a set of data feeds (e.g. RSS feeds for search queries or searches based on the OpenSearch Standard) and an API which can be leveraged to build applications or widgets upon its search technology or integrate it on your website.

Lumerias is available in English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish.

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)