By now, search engines have become so ubiquitous, so powerful, so reliable and so integrated into all of our online lives that we've pretty much stopped thinking about them.

Need to find something? Just type your search into your browser's search bar and boom! There you are—generally speaking.

But we often forget that they're so useful and so effective because they search text. And text has enough limited parameters —the alphabet, the words themselves, the grammar that holds them all together—that it can be processed relatively easily by computers.

Written language is made up of an agreed-upon system of symbols and computers can deal with those symbols.

But what about multimedia content? As PCs have become more powerful over the years, producing (and publishing) stuff other than text has become a lot easier and more economical.

Today all you need is a combination of Macromedia's and Adobe's suite of products and you've as much publishing, editing and media manipulating power on your desktop as a whole commercial studio of a mere 20 years ago. Maybe more.

There's a lot more multimedia content being produced today than ever before. And just as we've learned how important it is for search engines to find our text, it's becoming more and more apparent that we need to learn how to deal with images and video so that our users (or potential users) can find the content we're putting up.

Still images are one thing—judicious use of ALT tags is pretty much all you need to make sure that your images get indexed. But video presents a different set of problems.

In the days before nearly universal broadband and less-powerful computers, video was more of a novelty. Today, however, video's hot.

More and more individuals are producing and publishing video content on their desktops and more and more commercial publishers are making their video content available online for free or starting up new "Web-only" online video units.

Advertisers are noticing and many projections (including this one from a year ago that already seems as if it may be conservative) show more and more money ready to be poured into online video.

Manufacturers are cranking out digital video players like crazy and with hybrid devices such as the Sony PSP, are putting the ability to both time and place-shift video content into the hands of hundreds of thousands of consumers.

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Lots of people are searching for video content and you can be sure that there will be a lot more to come. (Doubt it? A recent article in Wired that examined the Daily Show online video phenomenon should be enough to turn skeptics into believers.)

But actually finding video content can be tough. As anyone who's used either Yahoo's or Google's video search features has discovered, most searches for video can be pretty unsatisfying.

The search world's well aware of this problem and upstarts like blinkx have worked to fill the gap—to moderate levels of success.

In general, the problem is that there are no real universal standards for indexing video content.

Some of the better search engines look at the closed-captioning track for metadata and some look at the surrounding text for cues.

But these methods have been only somewhat successful because of the way digital video is often served up: without metadata and via a script-based interface that doesn't lend itself well to indexing.

That's why a new startup called Truveo is so interesting.

It uses the methods of its predecessors but adds on a "visual crawling" approach that approximates the way that a human looks at video content, "looking" at the context of the video in order to suck in additional metadata.

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For the moment, it appears that Truveo actually works pretty well at finding a good assortment of video content. They're still working on it (it's in Beta) and it hasn't indexed anywhere near the level of pages that Google or Yahoo! claim to have indexed, but my casual trials were pretty successful.

Still though, Truveo's approach is somewhat of a kludge, even if it's a pretty clever way of solving a growing problem.

What we need to start looking at is better ways for making video content available for search so that the content we publish actually gets seen.

It's possible to look at sites like Flickr and realize that a large portion of their success has come out of the "tagging" features available on them that make specific pictures easier to find.

As convergence continues to become a reality, as more and more consumers get comfortable with video and creating video becomes easier and easier with tools such as Apple's iMovie, Serious Magic's VlogIt or Userplane's AVBlogger, the bar on expectations will continue to be raised and online publishers will have to respond with increased broadband video content.

But as we all know, building it isn't enough to make them come—they have to be able to find you on the Web.

Solutions like Truveo's are a start, but we need to seriously start considering how video and search are going to play together in the future.

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