The early days of video search from Adage is a great read.

By now, everyone knows full episodes of ABC prime-time shows are available on the network’s website, ABC.com. But let’s say you didn’t know that — and you were looking online for the final episode of the most recent season of “Lost.” You might go where most people go to look for things online: Google. You type in the words “Lost final episode video.” What’s the first result?

A three-minute YouTube clip that’s not the final episode at all but a spoof from the Consumer Electronics Show of Kate and Sawyer walking on the beach talking about going to Vegas to see how the HD DVD/Blu-ray rivalry plays out — with Spanish subtitles. Not at all what you were looking for, to say the least.

Exactly. The result is a non-result. Here’s another example.

1. The “Saturday Night Live” sketch “Lazy Sunday” broke out as a viral hit on YouTube.
Lazy Sunday YouTube

2. But a Google search for “SNL videos” turned up nothing from NBC on the first page of results — until the network undertook some major video-search-optimization efforts.

3. Now the top search result on Google for “SNL videos” is a rich NBC site.

So the question is, how will this be fixed?

This scenario is likely to change as Google improves its video-search function and as video sites it didn’t use to detect — such as ABC.com’s Flash player — start to become more relevant. Of course, you could search again, refining your keywords until you find what you want. But this example also illustrates the immaturity of the video-search market. No proven, paid video-search model exists yet.

Richard Hagerty, CEO of Impaqt, a search-engine-marketing agency outside of Pittsburgh, says the state of video search reminds him of where text search was seven years ago — in part because monetization of video search barely exists, if at all, and mostly because of the relatively rudimentary ways in which marketers optimize video to show up in search results.

“In the early days of search, you had a big title tag, a graphic in the middle of the page and a description describing the page,” he says. “We’re back to that with video.”

Again, there is no universal standard yet.

“We’re still in the early stage in terms of marketing opportunities for video search,” agrees David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy at 360i, which boasts video-heavy companies such as NBC Universal, Scripps Networks and MTV Networks as search clients. “It’s in natural search where more opportunity lies.” He says one of the problems with video search that doesn’t plague text search is there isn’t a universal standard for how videos get indexed into search engines.

Lessons learned for online video producers? Yes, that includes you marketers.

Keep creating and uploading your videos and attempting to optimize them with highly-relevant key phrases. Then hope and pray that what you did worked. If it did, you’ll be sitting atop the Google mountain when the day comes.