AT&T Launches Blinkx-Like Video Search Service

AT&T has just launched its own online video search application. VideoCrawler, which officially debuts in beta today, lets you find and share multimedia content from a variety of providers.

Technology developed by Silicon Valley startup Divvio — remember, the guys who said they wanted to become the “Google of audio and video”? — powers the service. AT&T claims to have “hundreds of millions” of clips from “thousands of sites” already indexed, and some sample searches did turn up more robust results than what I found on competing video search services. My random searches turned up primarily clips from MySpace, Truveo, YouTube, and Jogli.

Like competitor Blinkx, VideoCrawler aims to add a social layer to the searching experience by letting you create playlists and embed them into your blogs or social network profiles via an embeddable widget. Its layout — which I personally found to be a bit clunky, with things like the “Results” window randomly toggling back and forth between my query and other generic offerings — is fully customizable, allowing you to drag and drop boxes at your will.

The site does not actually host any videos. It is fully ad-supported.