Is Dabble the Next Google of Video Search?

If Mary Hodder, the brilliant mathematician CEO of Dabble, has anything to say about it, the answer is a resounding yes, and no...

Let me explain. Dabble -- currently in beta -- was founded with the singular mission to be the primary "search engine" of choice for videos from all over the Web. Dabble gathers video data from hundreds of hosting sites, as well as from tens of thousands of other websites, and then keeps a record of where Web-based videos are located, descriptions about the video, who made it, what it's about, how popular it is, and so on.

This record, called "metadata", makes it easy to search and find videos. But Dabble goes further than simply indexing this metadata -- and this is where similarities to Google end. The site also employs the power of social networking, where the community of Dabble members adds details and notes, corrects mistakes, and shares what's valuable to them about the media, enhancing the metadata in a massive team effort that goes far beyond what any one site can do alone.

Although you don't need to join Dabble to perform a video search, there are many benefits to becoming a Dabble member. With a Dabble membership, users can start collecting and organizing favorite videos. Wherever a user travels on the Web, they can quickly and easily import links to the videos they discover into their own personal Dabble collection. Members can also add their own comments and "tags" (keywords) to share with the member community, and they can organize videos into playlists, like all the videos about a favorite person or topic.

Because all the other Dabble members are organizing videos too, chances are they can find existing playlists in the Dabble community about whatever they're interested in, and find new videos that way.

So far, Dabble has added over 1.5 million videos to their database from more than 240 video hosting sites and thousands of individual users and other sites, and Mary expects the site to ultimately maintain records on the more than 15 million videos expected to be on the Web by next year. The company is also in high-level meetings with a bunch of 800-pound Web gorillas  that have an interest in licensing Dabble's services. Clearly, many see the incredible value that Dabble has created and how the company is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the IP video tsunami that's hitting the Web, and I wouldn't be the least surprised if the company quickly finds a deep-pocketed partner in the very near term.