As consumer demand for online video swells, America Online (AOL) announced Tuesday that it has acquired Truveo, a provider of video search, to boost its capabilities in this area, considered one of the hottest segments of the search engine market.

Truveo, founded in January 2004 and based in Burlingame, California, has developed a "crawling" technology that, it claims, allows it to find and index Web video content that remains invisible to conventional Web spiders.

Truveo calls its technology "Visual Crawler" because the company says that it can detect video content by identifying visual characteristics, similarly to how a human does it.

Truveo's approach also allows it to automatically compile and retrieve descriptive information about the videos it indexes. By capturing this metadata, such as a video clip's date, length, title, director and producer, Truveo makes the content of its index easier to search, according to the company.

AOL plans to integrate Truveo's technology into its video search services in the coming months. Truveo's search engine is available for free at http://www.truveo.com.

AOL's acquisition of the privately-held startup closed in December. Financial details aren't being released.