The Best Way To Search Videos On the Internet
By Katherine Boehret
Wall Street Journal
August 22, 2007; Page D1
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118773008539604389.html?mod=technology_featured_stories_hs
Some fascinating results can be produced when you scour the Internet using
a giant search engine like Google's. You can discover the seedy past of a
creep you might have otherwise dated, find directions to the nearest Thai
restaurant, or instantly learn how many inches are in a mile (63,360).
But searching for video, the hottest content on the Web right now, isn't
easy. Sure, you can go to Google's popular YouTube site and look for clips
stored there. But that won't find videos from other sites, especially
copyrighted clips that YouTube doesn't offer or has removed from its site.
This week, I tested four video-search engines, including revamped entrant
Truveo.com, a smartly designed site that combs through Web video from all
sorts of sources ranging from YouTube to broadcasting companies. Truveo, a
subsidiary of AOL, is stepping out on its own again after spending three
years in the background, powering video search for the likes of Microsoft,
Brightcove and AOL itself. It unveiled its new site last week, though I've
been playing with it for a few weeks now.
This Web site, www.truveo.com, operates under the idea that users don't
merely search for video by entering specific words or phrases, like they
would when starting a regular Web search. Instead, Truveo thinks that
people don't often know what they're looking for in online video searches,
and browsing through content helps to retrieve unexpected and perhaps
unintended (but welcome) results. I found that, compared with other sites,
Truveo provided the most useful interface, which showed five times as many
results per page as the others and encouraged me to browse other clips.
In effect, Truveo combines the browsing experience of a YouTube with the
best Web-wide video-search engine I've seen.
The other video-search sites I tested included Google's
(www.google.com/video) and Yahoo's (www.video.yahoo.com), as well as
Blinkx.com (www.blinkx.com). None of these three sites do much to encourage
browsing; by default they display as many as 10 results per search on one
page and display the clips in a vertical list, forcing you to scroll down
to see them all. The majority of clips watched on Truveo, Yahoo and Blinkx
direct you to an external link to play the video on its original content
provider's site -- which takes an extra step and often involves watching an
advertisement.
Searching on Google video almost always displays only content from Google
and its famously acquired site, YouTube. The giant search company is
working on improving its search results to show a better variety of content
providers. Still, the upside here is that clips play right away in the
search window rather than through a link to the site where the video
originated. YouTube works this way because its clips are user-generated --
either made by users and posted to the site or copied from original host
sites and posted to YouTube, saving a trip to the original content
provider's site.
Yahoo's video-searching page looks clean and uncluttered, with a large box
for entering terms or phrases with which to conduct searches. Two options
-- labeled "From Yahoo! Video" and "From Other Sites" -- help you sort
results in one step. But the clips that I found on Yahoo video seemed less
relevant, overall, and included more repeated clips. One search for the
Discovery Channel's "Man Versus Wild" show returned seven clips, four of
which were identical.
Blinkx, a three-year-old site, distinguishes itself with its "wall" feature
-- a visually stimulating grid of moving video thumbnails. It is like
Truveo in that it also works behind the scenes for bigger companies,
including Ask.com. Blinkx says it uses speech recognition and analysis to
understand what the video is about, while the others stick to text-based
searching. And this seemed to hold true: I rarely got results that were
completely off-base using Blinkx.
But Truveo's focus on browsing and searching worked well. It repeatedly
displayed spot-on results when I was looking for a video about a specific
subject, or provided a variety of other videos that were similar, requiring
less overall effort on my part. Its most useful feature is the way it shows
results: by sorting clips into neatly organized buckets, or categories,
such as Featured Channels, Featured Tags and Featured Categories. These
buckets spread out on the page in a gridlike manner, giving your eye more
to see in a quick glance.
This grid also lets you change the direction of your search quickly. Tabs
at the top of the page can re-sort your results according to Most Viewed
Now, Today, This Week, This Month or of All Time. Three more tabs rearrange
the results into Highest Rated, Most Recent (my personal favorite) and Most
Relevant.
The other video-search sites offered fewer details, overall, about each
clip. This meant that I had to waste time opening and watching clips to
discern whether they were what I wanted to see.
I searched for a variety of things, including a new television series
called "Mad Men" on AMC that has me hooked. The show is still just gaining
popularity, so I was curious to see what my video search would return. A
single Truveo search can display as many as 51 results on a page, and the
bucket organizational system placed all of these results into a layout that
didn't look overwhelming. Of the four sites, Truveo had the highest number
of clips related to the actual television show: 32 out of 51. On the other
sites, all of which show 10 results per page, all of the Blinkx clips, five
of the Google clips and eight of the Yahoo clips were relevant.
With the exception of a few clips, Truveo search results include a
thumbnail image of each video, its title, channel and category, and a line
about how old the clip is and how many times it has been viewed.
The top 15 results -- grouped into three columns of five clips each --
feature slightly larger thumbnail images, and moving a cursor over one of
these larger images shows a brief summary of that clip.
If your search generates numerous relevant clips on a well-known Web site,
a special bucket is created at the top right of Truveo's results page that
will hold just that site's clips. For example, if you were to search an MTV
show that's popular enough to have a lot of clips available directly
through the MTV.com Web site, a bucket is designated just for MTV.com clips.
Truveo is considering selling this prominent bucket as an advertisement in
the future, but for now, no ads appear on the video-search site.
With so many videos added to the Web each day, the search for online clips
can be fruitless and tiresome. Truveo starts users out with enough relevant
clips right away so that they can more easily find what they're looking
for. And its organizational buckets encourage browsing and, therefore,
entertainment -- one of the reasons for Web video's popularity.
Truveo takes a refreshing look at video search, and as long as you have the
patience to travel to sites where content originated, you'll find it
useful. It stands apart from other search engines in looks and functionality.
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
