This week has been about Online Video over at Read/WriteWeb. A perfect example of the relationship between Read/WriteWeb and this blog, AltSearchEngines, is our contibution.

First, we featured our Top 10 Video Alternative Search Engines as our Monday Vertical.

Second, we hosted one of our “Great Debates” in the middle of the week with this topic, Video Search. Our participants were Mary Hodder of Dabble, and Gary Baker of ClipBlast!, both “Top 10″ alternative video search engines.

Third, since we feature a Search Engine of the Day, today we are taking a closer look at Fooooo, a newcomer to the Top 10 list. I hope that spotlighting Fooooo helps to show our commitment to all alternative search engines.

Regarding the Search Engine of the Day feature, one reader contacted me to say that they often lacked detail. The explanation of “What’s in a Name” might be in another post, and issues such as funding might be missing altogether. Put them all together, this reader advised, and make it a more robust feature.

An excellent idea!I hope that if you have a suggestion for AltSearchEngines that you will also send me an email: Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com.

So, what shall we say about Fooooo?

Fooooo is a Japanese Video Search Engine. It is run by the Bank of Innovation in Tokyo, Japan. In this building

And while it boasts several international versions, it actually pulls from one common index (42 million videos from video sites such as YouTube and MySpace; it is not a true web-crawling search engine) with multi-lingual homepages.

David Vogelpohl of Marketing Pilgrim, in his review of Fooooo, gave it a score of 7/10. His primary recommendation was that they need to divide their index according to language, and not just the homepages, an excellent point.

The search results link you to the source of each video (it does not host them), or you can use the ‘Quick Start’ link and play the video right away. When I “tested” Fooooo by looking for one easy video (The Machine is Us/ing Us) and one difficult video (SNL’s “Tiny Elvis” skit), Fooooo returned Tiny Elvis as result #1.

Fooooo also has a Facebook application:

When I searched the “About Us” information, it was all in Japanese and looked like this on my screen!:



So I went to Google Translate (yep, Google is very good at some things), and it came out like this:







Regarding funding, it turns out that Fooooo received funding just two weeks ago, according to alarm:clock.

“Daisuke Tanaka, Founder of the Japanese Video Search Engine Fooooo, gets in touch to let us know that he has raised $100K in seed financing from CyberAgent, a Japanese IT venture company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.”

But the hardest partof my review was trying to figure out what the heck “Fooooo” means!

One possibilty is that it belongs to a Japanse wrestler / TV star known as “Hard Gay” Razor Ramon. One blog post says, “In Japan, he’s known simply as “Hard Gay” or “HG.” His trademark move is hip-thrusting and ending every other sentence with a scream of “Fooooo!!!”


Another usage seems to be the trash American equivalent of “Fool,” the way that our TV character Mr. T’s signature expression was, “I pity the foooool.”

It may also be a variable used in quantum physics, similar to Google’s mathematical roots.

UPDATE FROM Fooooo:

Hello Charles,

Thanks for introducing “Fooooo”.
I hope I can answer your question.

First, we pronounce “Fooooo” as [ fu: ].

Second, Fooooo’s “F” means “find” and “five”,
and “ooooo” means “five continents”, like olympic symbols.

Thanks, Daisuke

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under Newcomers, Alts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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