Thumbnails are becoming pervasive on search results pages of Google, Ask, Yahoo! and on many customized search pages. Thumbnails had been mostly the domain of image search -- look up a celebrity under the image category and there's the photo. Well, it turns out that thumbnails have become a powerful way to drive traffic to video clips. This is clearly demonstrated by Google Video's recent introduction of related thumnails across the top of video player pages. YouTube has just added some very cool thumbnails to its pages -- these images expand with a rollover of the curser. Pixsy is a San Francisco-based start-up that has built a business around searching and organizing image thumbnails. It has found that this technology works well with video. Now, about half of the company's indexed images are from videos. This make a lot of sense. After all, many video sharing sites generate thumbnail images. Moreover, Pixsy creates millions of thumbnails. The images are found and indexed by organizing metadata, not through the more exotic methods of audio or image recognition. Chase Norlin, CEO, was at the Beet.TV studios in steamy Manhattan this week. We spoke about thumbnails and his business. The company is not a portal, but is a provider of video and image search services to many companies. He just announced an agreement to put the Pixsy utility on eZanga. Chase says he wants his company to be the "Google of Thumbnails". Not sure about that, but these little images are becoming a huge business. See this video on Beet.TV: http://www.beet.tv/2007/06/thumbnails-are-.html Less