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One of the interesting thing about the whole YouTube phenomenon is that it is really not about video search but more about the social aspects of uploading video and sharing videos. For example, a search for uranium on YouTube simply found various documentary that has the keyword “uranium” in its metadata either in the form of the title of the video or description of the video. No thing earth shattering here in terms of “Video Search”
So where do I go if I want to do some serious Video searching against some serious video contents ?
One of the contender that has been around for a while is Blinkx, which has been talked about for a number of years but never really taken off. It was even rumoured to be targeted by News Corp as an acquisition target back in 2005.
What’s different about its video search engine ?
Well, according to the explanation on the technology page of their website:
“blinkx takes a holistic approach to video search: the power of its solution lies in using every characteristic of the video itself to understand the content. For example, blinkx listens to the sound track using speech-to-text technology, looks at the images on screen using advanced video analytics, and reads other information embedded into the file by using media-analysis plug-ins to extract, for example, closed captioning. In this way, blinkx is processing as much information as possible to enable both extremely accurate search, and more advanced operations such as automatic hyperlinking of related content or implicit query, which understands the content a user is producing and viewing.”
In essence, the index that Blinkx generates and uses for searching involves a much more sophisticated analysis process that looks beyond the basic text based metadata associated with the video (if there is one) but take into consideration other aspects of a video asset such as the spoken words and the images on the screen. Simply put, the Blinkx engine generates text based metadata out of video contents and use it to power its search process.
The other cool aspect of the search engine is in the way it presents its results back to the user. in what it describes as “blinkx Video Wall“. The user can chose to have the search result presented as wall of animated short clips so that he can quickly scan through them and use the visual as another clue to work out which one he needs to watch.
Does it work ?
My experience using the Blinks engine has been a hit and miss one.
A search for “Uranium Bush” came back with the following results
Here are the problems
1. There are obvious duplicates in my results in the FIRST PAGE !! (Check out the multiple identical George Bush clips!)
2. Within one of the video news clips returned, there is no Uranium in the metadata nor was there any mention of Uranium in the video at all! Now its arguable that the mention of Nuclear weapon has an association with Uranium so hence it should be returned. Still the fact that you just don’t know what you gonna get is a little worrying.
3. Because blinkx does not keep any of the video contents and often forward the user to an external site. Here is where one of the result link ended:
Not a good experience when you done your search, picked what you think is the relevant result but only to be disappointed at the last step.
Whilst the technology has lots of potential and has some interesting applications, it is by no means perfect in the sense of a “Google Like” search experience that we all expect these days. Which explains its struggle for traffic and broad acceptance by the public.
The bottom line is, when a user search for some thing regardless of whether it is Website, Video or Location, the search engine has to deliver it, I am afraid blinkx is not quite there yet when it comes to Video.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice review, Felix, of some of the things going on in video search. It’s definitely an area of search that is evolving rapidly.
One way to see how the different video search sites compare is to use Zuula’s video search option. It provides easy access to video search results from nine leading video sites.
And, as always with Zuula, the order of the video search engines can be changed simply by dragging-and-dropping the search engine tabs at the top of every search results page (or in the Preferences section of Zuula).
Happy Holidays!
Hi Boris, Zuula does in deed has a good selection of video search websites. Looking forward to the next phase of development from Zuula!