Media search platform provider Pixsy has signed a deal with bargain hotel and travel site lastminute.com that will see Pixsy operate a travel focused video and image search engine at lastminute.pixsy.com

The new service will allow users to search millions of travel photos and videos while simultaneously shopping for travel services.

Pixsy has been on a roll of late, signing deals to power search on sites including Veoh. Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin said that the partnership is a great example of Pixsy’s ability to provide vertical media search solutions to websites in various content categories.

Pixsy was named a Top 50 Coolest Website by Time Magazine and first reviewed by TechCrunch in August 2006.

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Media search platform provider Pixsy has announced a strategic partnership with video sharing service Veoh Networks that wil see Veoh adopting Pixsy’s media search platform to offer enhanced video and image search functionality on Veoh.com.

Pixsy’s appeal to Veoh is the ability to deliver near-real time search results, allowing Veoh users to search videos and images with content updating to the minute.

Dmitry Shapiro, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Veoh Networks said “Pixsy’s vast index and ability to organize their breadth of video and image content in a way that maps to our users’ interests will meaningfully enhance the viewing experience on Veoh.”

Since taking an additional $26 million in funding back in June, Veoh has seen an increase in traffic whilst facing an increase in lawsuits as well. According to Alexa, Veoh has now broken into the Top 100 sites online, and is edging towards the Top 50. On the other hand their popularity has come at a price, with Veoh being sued by Universal, Viacom and NBC, and perhaps just to keep the lawyers busy, Veoh filed a counter suit against Universal in August.

For Pixsy, the deal will see their technology being used by Veoh’s more than 18 million monthly viewers, validation that their search capabilities not only work, but can scale as well.

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Xcavator.net is a stock photo search portal based on visual search technology.

Xcavator.net provides natural and intuitive interactive search for stock photography providing buyers with a browsing experience based on both visual content and keywords. The key to the visual search capabilities is the portal’s color and image search engines, powered by CogniSign Intelligent Image Recognition Technology.

In laymen’s terms, Xcavator.net offers three types of interrelated search options. Tradition search delivers photos based on tagged keywords and is much the same as others in the stock photography market. Where Xcavator.net gets interesting is in color and image search. Xcavator.net allows color search matching, for example if a stock photograph was needed that matched a brochure or web site in terms of colors, users are able to refine the photo search to those colors by utilizing a color chart or by inserting the exact hexadecimal color into a box. Image search provides similar photos based on a user uploaded image or via a drag and drop of images found in an initial search.

Xcavator.net competes with other visual search sites including Riya, Pixsy and PicSearch. Xcavator isn’t necessarily better than any of their competitors, but different. The color and related search capabilities don’t have the same level of user enjoyment as Riya’s search features do, yet Xcavator.net’s features feel more practical and are definitely more finely targeted at niche stock photo search.

Xcavator.net recently signed a deal with iStockphoto that delivers 1.8 Million images from 38,000 contributors into the Xcavator.net search database. The site comes out of Beta on July 2.

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Time Magazine called image and video search engine Pixsy “clever” in its list of the Top 50 Coolest Websites early this month. I talked to Pixsy about their technology tonight and I think it’s something more than clever. On a pace to have 5 billion thumbnail images and counting indexed around the first of next year, Pixsy could make a whole lot of money. The images come from places ranging from YouTube to the New York Times. The idea is to license the company’s huge index of thumbnail shots, vertical search and ajax UI to medium and large media companies seeking some spice for their search, news or other text pages. The company has between 5 and 10 million images indexed now but says that number is growing exponentially. Yahoo! and Google reported image indexes of 1.5 and 2 billion respectively last year.

Pixsy will release a demo site called StarHabit next week and will target bloggers shortly thereafter. More on that below.

Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin, formerly of adverstiser ValueClick, told me that the company’s images are indexed using a combination of facial recognition technology, closed caption reading and audio converted into text. The data is drawn in by RSS. In addition to the Pixsy main page, a page on the domain labled Morpheus Visual Search is interesting.

When I asked about intellectual property concerns, Norlin cited the case Kelly v. Arriba Soft in 2002 as evidence that thumbnails are fair use. Pixsy is of the belief that they and their customers can wrap whatever advertisements they like around thumbnails from anywhere online. Neither Google nor Yahoo! currently places advertisements on the pages containing their thumbnail image results, Ask.com places some at the very bottom of the page. Norin says that publisher will welcome Pixsy search as it will drive more users to their original content. That makes sense to me.

Pixsy will unveil a showcase sight called StarHabit early next week that uses the company’s technology to demonstrate what it hopes will become an important and lucrative part of vertical search. Starhabit will search for photos and video of celebrities.

Shortly thereafter, small publishers like bloggers and social network users will be able to place their own customized Pixsy visual search boxes inside their pages and share an undisclosed portion of the ad revenue from search results pages. Will bloggers go for this? I’m skeptical, unless the UI is designed unusually well. That could happen, but I’m not sure that small publishers will want to pay the price of sending their readers off to a Pixsy domain.

The real potential here could be in licensing thumbnails to enterprise customers. Anyone aggregating text content could well be very interested in combining that data with real time aggregated visual data. I look forward to seeing if there are truly creative uses found for the technology or if Pixsy will instead just contribute to a glut of ad driven visuals online. Hopefully the UI for small publishers will be good enough and the price for large publishers high enough that it will be a quality experience all around.

Pixsy cites numbers finding that visual search is the fastest growing segment of search on the web today and they seem well situated to monetize that market.

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