A system and method that provides a hosted network video guide
application. The guide application is provided as a service to web
portals and other websites that wish to expose access to the video
content available on a public network such as the Internet. The operation
of the guide includes mechanisms for search application hosting and
processes for content gathering. Video index information can be derived
from random content owners, guide affiliates, proactively gathered public
domain content, and proactively harvested video content from the network
via a video spidering mechanism. The video index information can be
collected and maintained in a hosted, centralized repository and made
available via an application interface, which can be customized, to users
of the network. The video spidering mechanism generates an index of each
accessed video, and the index is committed to the guide repository along
with the URL information of the video being indexed.