These days, you can't search for a video online without turning up an irrelevant array of skits, celebrity interviews and home-movie bloopers. A search for "Dodgers" turns up a video about draft dodgers, as well as the baseball team, and "Cruise" will turn up footage of Tom Cruise, cruise missiles and cars with cruise control.

But in recent weeks, a host of new search services have taken aim at the problem, and the $1.65 billion marriage of Google and YouTube -- leaders in Web search and Web video, respectively -- is likely to spur even more innovation that will yield more accurate and relevant results.

It has long been hard for search engines to find video footage because it typically doesn't contain any text to search for. Instead, what video-search engines hunt down are text clues in file names or on the Web page the video is embedded in. Music videos, which can easily be labeled by artist, song or genre, are relatively easy to find, but a lot of programming can't so easily be characterized.

Now, video-search engines are trying to improve their results by trying new imaging and speech-recognition technologies and broadening their scope with new partnerships. This fall, several new and old video-search companies have launched services that make it easier for browsers to home in on that must-see late-night-comedy clip. On Tuesday, Blinkx.tv, a popular San Francisco-based video-search service, launched a Web site that makes it easier for users to scan and sort through video-search results. It uses speech-recognition and visual-analysis technology to help compile results.

Earlier this week, PureVideo Networks Inc., of El Segundo, Calif., went live with a new video-search engine that pulls feeds from hundreds of video sites, from Microsoft's MSN Video to YouTube to ESPN. Metacafe Inc., a Web-video site with sophisticated methods of searching user-submitted videos, is planning to launch a new site later this month and will soon roll out enhancements -- like search algorithms tailored to different languages and countries.

The big names in basic Web searching, too, are upgrading their products. Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, which has invested heavily in video-search technology in recent years, has in the past few weeks overhauled the search technology on aolvideo.com to better search through "contextual" data (like other text on the page where a video may be embedded) and to deploy technologies that translate a video's audio into easily searchable text.

While Google, of Mountain View, Calif., says it has no immediate plans to include YouTube content in its Google Video index, it has been fine-tuning its video site in other ways. The company recently began encouraging users to upload and display closed captions along with their videos which consumers will soon be able to search across, says Peter Chane, group business product manager for Google Video.

Moreover, Google's huge investment in a site exclusively devoted to video (the YouTube acquisition is the largest in the company's history), is seen as a sign that Google has ambitions to dominate the field of video search much in the way it has done text. That's likely to set off a race among Google's competitors to stake out the market -- often deploying cutting-edge technology that they hope will give them an edge. "Google's acquisition of YouTube marks a turning point," says Tim Tuttle, vice president of AOL Video, who says AOL is now trying to carve out its own niche in the space by searching across as many different sources of video as possible -- not just those it hosts.

U.S. Internet users streamed more than seven billion videos in July, according to comScore Networks Inc. MySpace.com captured the largest share, followed by Yahoo and YouTube. But when measured by overall traffic, YouTube holds the top spot, with 46 percent of visits among the top sites tracked by market researcher Hitwise. "There is no Google or Yahoo of video search," says Brian Haven, an analyst at market researcher Forrester Research. "But with the content exploding and the momentum so strong, there is no way around it happening." Other technologies that are still being tested include facial-recognition software and the ability to tag different frames in a clip to help search within videos.

Still, finding what you want remains onerous. When Dave Schroeder of Madison, Wis., was recently searching for videos about Paris Hilton getting arrested on YouTube, he found a bunch of videos that had been tagged with her name but had nothing to do with the star -- a sneaky way content creators often seek to drive traffic to their clips.

People who upload videos have their own complaints. Kevin Nalty, a health-care marketer from Doylestown, Pa., says figuring out which of his videos will show up where is a guessing game because the sites are "bloated" with inventory. As a result, the 39-year-old tries to label his videos with as many peripherally related words he can think of, including misspellings. By labeling one recent video documenting his attempt to tape wheels onto his daughter's sneakers with the word "Healies" -- a misspelling of "Heelys," the popular sneakers with retractable wheels -- he was able to climb higher in various video-search results.

A variety of more-elegant search approaches are in the works. To boost relevancy and pare down results, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Metacafe rejects duplicates from its site by creating a unique digital fingerprint for each file and cross-referencing it against what's already there. The process weeds out between 20 percent and 40 percent of submissions on a given day, according to the company's co-founder and chief executive, Arik Czerniak. The company also attempts to ensure that the most interesting content "floats to the top" by introducing new clips first to a select group of users who choose to download its software. Popular clips migrate to the search results on the home page.

While some sites like Metacafe are refining their ability to search content on their own site, others are searching across more video collections. A search for "President Bush" on aolvideo.com, for instance, will pull up a variety of news and entertainment clips, while the same search on YouTube is skewed toward parodies, spitting up among its most "relevant" results a Bush look-a-like doll making a speech to Pakistanis.

Recognizing that video searches are also, in large part, about entertainment, many players are experimenting with compelling new ways to deliver results that go beyond a string of links. For instance, by displaying results for a query on a "video wall" where a preview of each clip is played, Blinkx.tv helps users quickly distinguish between an interview with a celebrity and that same celebrity's latest music video.

Some coming video-search technologies

Facial recognition: Identifying key characters in video clips by their faces.

Audio recognition: Transcribing audio into searchable text.

Visual mapping: Looking at screen contrast to determine the location of scenes.

Frame tagging: Marking individual frames in a video with descriptions of what's happening in that scene.