One of the reasons people want huge hard disks is video. Sure, video clips can be gigantic files, but high-speed Internet connections make them easy to download, and sophisticated software tools make it easier than ever to produce homemade video content as well. So video is hot, except for one hitch: How do you find it?

A case in point: I do a lot of writing about space, and was curious to see how the media were treating The Planetary Society's solar sail -- Cosmos 1 -- as last week's launch date approached. The usual search engines all yielded plenty of material, but almost all of it was from the print media. Then I remembered Singingfish, a search site set up by AOL exclusively to handle searches for multimedia files.

Singingfish (www.singingfish.com) started out as a technology demonstrator, set up to lure search providers who might want to license the technology. But the traffic flow has been heavy and AOL is now pitching it at mass market users. My search on "solar sail" turned up several video clips, but also highlighted the problem with video searches, namely that few of these files are well indexed.

Here's why: Most of the video files on the Web have little or no metadata, which is information that indexes a given file and tells you such things as when it was made, who produced it and what it's about. The average video file has to be found by using the metadata, just as a TV schedule tells you where to look for a given show, and perhaps offers a synopsis of the show's content.

Another problem is that the growing number of video-search engines have made deals with different content providers. There is not, in other words, a central source for searching across a wide spectrum of video materials. I took my solar-sail search to Yahoo, which recently launched a video search service of its own, video.yahoo.com.

Yahoo proves surprisingly useful on solar sail background materials, with videos from some of the firms that are investigating the new space technology for NASA, each with a still image of the video in question, and a link that launches the file. But another problem quickly becomes evident. These huge files don't stay long on company servers, and some of Yahoo's links no longer work.

While both Yahoo and Google (video.google.com) are exploring the video search space, the search process remains primitive. You wind up looking at images from video clips trying to figure out whether the clip in question will actually discuss what you need.

So I turned to the wild card in video search, a company called Blinkx.

Based in San Francisco, Blinkx has produced a search engine with a difference, www.blinkx.tv. Enter a search term here and you get not just an image from the file, but the actual context in which your search term is embedded. What Blinkx has done is to transcribe all the video clips it searches, meaning you can look into the clip itself to make sure that what you've found fits your search needs.

Blinkx can search across sources such as CNN, BBC News, Reuters and others, but of course, there's a catch: Many of the video clips are unavailable for full viewing. The only recourse is to go to the listed content-provider site and hope the clip is available there, a time-consuming process.

Cosmos 1 failed, but video search won't, even if all kinds of problems remain to be solved. Surely the best solution is voice recognition applied to video clips to produce full scripts of their content that can be integrated with traditional search methods.

How that solution may evolve should be a fascinating thing to watch as moving video becomes integrated into search technology.