By: Senior staff writer – Easton Ellsworth

Most techies would agree that video search = FAIL for a long time now.

Not that it’s hard to find videos. Videos are everywhere on the Web, and there are dozens of sites hosting millions of them.

Rather, the problem has long been finding the videos you want to find.

Enter VideoSurf.

Don’t let the weird “computer vision search engine” phrase worry you: VideoSurf is the real deal, and it makes finding videos an entirely different experience from the hunt-and-peck-using-text-keywords-and-tags days of yore.

Basically – and this is my crack at explaining something I haven’t personally seen and honestly don’t quite understand – VideoSurf analyzes the actual content of videos and figures out what people and objects are shown in them. It then lets you search its database to find a video, or a person, or even a single moment.

Oh, and did I mention that Al Gore is one of VideoSurf’s investors? Yeah.

Those two reasons alone – okay, really the first one – places VideoSurf in a class by itself (for the moment). No other video search engine has been able to use computers instead of people to visually identify what’s in a video.

VideoSurf currently boasts an index of millions of videos from YouTube, Hulu and other prominent video sharing sites.

NewTeeVee calls VideoSurf “way cool.”

Searh Engine Land calls it “genuinely radical.”