Google is rolling out a speech recognition tool that adds a whole new dimension to video search. Previously, if you wanted to search for a YouTube video, you'd have to rely on the title and tags. Now you can actually search for spoken text in a video. Well, in selected videos only. Right now the speech recognition is only available in a handful of political videos.

You can check out the new feature by adding the Google Election Video Search Gadget to your iGoogle page. Or you can view the gadget as a standalone page. Just enter a search term and Google will locate videos where the word is uttered. Google will also add little yellow markers to the timeline letting you know where the word occurs.

Google uses speech recognition technology to automatically transcribe the text of these videos and add them to an index. Videos uploaded by politicians to their official YouTube channels are indexed within a few hours.

Google certainly isn't the first site to combine speech recognition with video search. Blinkx and EveryZing offer similar services. But Google is the 800 pound gorilla in both the search and online video worlds.

Just a few months after relaunching Truveo as a video search engine (as opposed to a video sharing site), AOL is taking Truveo worldwide. Or at least adding localized versions for a number of countries including France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Spain, Tawain, and the UK.

AOL, which owns both Truveo and this blog, plans to bring more regional versions online in the next few months. Australia, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Russia, and Turkey are all on the waiting list, because we know they've been waiting with baited breath for yet another website dedicated to online video.

While Truveo international might not be exactly what anyone outside of AOL was asking for, it makes a lot of sense. There are hundreds of sites dedicated to professional and user generated content not just in the US, but across the globe. And Truveo is already a pretty polished search engine for finding videos whether they're produced for YouTube or the Associated Press.

Much of the content on the US version of the site is already coming from overseas sources. Regional versions will make it easier for citizens to find Japanese, Indian, or German videos without sifting through all the English language crap on the web.

The localized sites do have the same limitations as the US version of Truveo. While the site indexes videos from across the web, and lets you play many videos without leaving the site, there are still a number of videos that are only available from the content producer's website. So it's hard to tell when you're looking at a screen filled with video thumbnails whether clicking on one will make a video start playing or take you to another website where you may need to install a browser plugin before the video will play properly.

The world of video advertising has only just begun. Google announced AdSense units using YouTube videos, and now Blinkx will be rewarding users for sharing video online.

Google offers AdSense customers a chance to provide exclusive content by placing ads over the top of online videos. But these flash ads can be distracting if you're watching a video. Blinkx takes a different approach by putting ads at the top of the video window so that there's never an ad covering the video display.

Blinkx is a video search engine with over 14 million hours of video online. Their technology uses both speech recognition and video analysis software to accurately find videos online from all major sources and now they are integrating this into targeted ad placement.

The Blinkx text ads will get placed together with embedded videos from such popular video sharing sites as YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Veoh, CollegeHumor and Daily Motion. This will work with any video, be it copyrighted or not. It works by simply dropping the embed code from a video site into a form that will spit out the new Blinkx embed code complete with additional ad codes. This will then allow users to place the videos on social networks, websites and blogs to earn revenue per click. Users must have an account on Blinkx Adhoc as well as a PayPal account which they will get paid through when the ads are clicked on.

Blinkx pays you for embedding videos from YouTube, Daily Motion and other sites on your website. It doesn't matter if you created the original video or not. And it doesn't look like there's anything to prevent you from making money on copyrighted content like clips from movies and TV shows.

We assume that copyright holders might get a little uptight about that. But since Blinkx inserts an ad above the video window and not inside of it, you could argue that this is kind of the same as adding a Google AdSense unit to a webpage above content.