Sai Groups: OneRiot adds video to its social search engine

On Tuesday, OneRiot, the social search engine that rose from the ashes of social browser extension Medium, is adding video. Users will now be able to search through videos from more than 30 video hosts, and just as it handles Web queries, the engine will put recently "buzzing" videos on top. This means the results of any given search term will change on an almost daily basis depending on what's trending, or as OneRiot calls it "raging."

OneRiot Vice President Tobias Peggs dropped by CNET's San Francisco office Monday to give me a demo of the service, and it already looks promising. For instance, searching for "shark attack" pulled up some gruesome videos from the past few days. The same search on Google came up with clips from one to two years ago.

With OneRiot's algorithm, of course, it could be the same old videos that show up as the top result, but as Peggs told me, the search tool's value is that these older videos can rise up to the top simply due to their connection with something that's timely or has been revived by social chatter. In my case it was simply seeing a shark attacking a large piece of meat off the side of a fishing boat, a clip that had been vetted as worthy of a watch by OneRiot's social sources.

One thing that's missing from the system but that will be added in a week or two is a way to filter these results. For now it's sorted by buzz factor, but new filters will let you sort by both overall popularity and how fresh the link is. This should make it simpler to figure out what's old and what's not.

Along with the addition of video, OneRiot's front page is getting a bit of a refresh. Instead of just headlines for trending stories, the site will include short summaries of the news to give you a tease of what's behind the link. Peggs says this will continue to develop as the product matures, effectively making the front page of OneRiot something closer to Digg or Technorati. Expect the focus on this to grow if OneRiot continues to go into other search verticals such as images, music, and product search.