Searching for video on the web can be a pain. There are so many video hosting/sharing sites on the web that finding the right video you need is like finding a single needle in 500,000 haystacks.

There are several contenders in the video search field though, notably SingingFish and PureVideo Search. Yeah, you can search within the interfaces of other sites such as YouTube or Yahoo! Video, but these sites are different in that they aggregate the results of other sharing sites in one interface.

I decided, for kicks, to put these sites to a bit of an informal test, after the jump that is.

I’m looking for clips of some specific things: “Vietnam Protest” (for a documentary I’m working on) and “goldfish” (for fun). I searched without quotes.

For Vietnam Protest, the results from Singingfish were targeted better – I got video of specific protests against the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, most of these clips were from AOL.com, Singingfish’s owner. No easy download here. An advantage that Singingfish has though is the ability to change the formats of your search, i.e. audio or video, Quicktime or Windows Media, etc.

PureVideo searches the Web2.0 sites such as Revver, YouTube, and Google Video. The videos there are hardly targeted to Vietnam Protests, in fact none of the clips show specific protests. I do like however the fact that you can track the search results via RSS.

SingingFish did not give me a single clip of a goldfish in the first two pages of results. I honestly didn’t think I’d get any since the search is based on text around the media, but still – it’d be nice to actually have some video of a goldfish when I search for it.

PureVideo is just the opposite. All the videos I see on the first page are actual videos of goldfish! The results are strangely more targeted here.

I think that SingingFish bases their results around professionally created content. Sites like ManiaTV, AOL.com, and iFilm all appear in the results list. At PureVideo Search, the sites are user-generated, Grouper, Revver, YouTube, etc. Each site has its advantage and each has a niche to appeal to. Pick accordingly!