Dabble, the video search startup that tries to rely on the intelligence of people rather than machines, is trucking along. We had the chance to catch up with founder Mary Hodder at SXSW this week, and got an update on her company’s status.

First up, Hodder told us that she’d hired a CEO, Kai Mildenberger, to replace herself, so she can focus on the technology and community aspects of the site rather than business deals. Hodder’s new title is CTO, and your can already see the difference in Dabble’s once-excruciatingly slow search engine’s revamped speed.

Mildenberger “has led four or five successful companies, all with nice exits,” as Hodder puts it. He was most recently CEO at electronic component search firm SupplyFrame (see LinkedIn).

Hodder also bragged that Dabble’s index, which compiles clips from hundreds of partner sites’ feeds and organizes their metadata, now comprises 8.7 million videos, beating out competitors such as Blinkx, which takes the somewhat different method of incorporating speech recognition to learn what a video is about. That’s out of an estimated 32 million (and growing) total videos across various video-sharing sites, much of which nobody is indexing yet.

Dabble will be one of first video search engines to soon index MySpace Vids, said Hodder. MySpace has the second-most visits of all video sites, according to analytics firm Compete. The videos are to be added to Dabble’s index imminently. The first outside company that indexes MySpace was Flurl in Belgium, which has personnel ties to MySpace, according to Hodder. Update: Hodder clarified via email that she’s not sure if Dabble is one of the first.

As for Dabble’s white-label video discussion features, a new revenue generator which was supposedly just about ready to launch when we covered it in December, Hodder said the company is withholding release until it can secure first-round funding.

However, she discussed an interesting business model for “powering the metadata” behind channel creators (someone like Magnify.net or Splashcast) and other sorts of video widgets, by using Dabble’s collective knowledge about what a video is, who made it, and where it is duplicated. With Dabble’s help, when a site’s users save or share videos, they wouldn’t have to go through the process of individually tagging and labeling a video themselves.