Search 1.x » Video

The New Visual Search Experience

Felix — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:44:00 +0000

As video and image content on the web becomes more prevalent and compelling, search engines are finding new and innovative ways for users to search and browse through these rich contents and provide a more visual search experience. Google Image search is great but the interface is really built on top of the traditional text web search and hasn’t evolved along with the type of rich content available now and user’s expectation in terms of searching for visually rich contents.

There has been various visual search engines that caters for these needs, they are really a special type of aggregation search engine that focus on video and images contents using a number of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These search engines are visually rich with very innovative user interface that are completely different from your traditional web search experience and you primarily browse and decide on where you want to drill into from the results set based on images or screen shots of the websites.

One of these visual search engines is SearchMe which display screen shots of the page and images in the results in an iTunes Cover Flow like layout that is familiar to iTunes users. This allows you to quickly decide which website to focus on based on the look of it by flicking through them.

CoolIris which is one my favourite alternative search engines is another visual search engine that is taking the idea of cover flow to the next level to provides a completely new and unique search experience.

As an example, when I search for “iPhone leather case” the look of the case is probably of the utmost importance to me as a searcher. additional, the ability to visually browse through all type of leather cases quickly and efficiently is also of benefit to me as a searcher. This is exactly what Cooliris allow you to do!

Cooliris not so much as provides a cover flow layout but more of a cover WALL layout that gives you the feeling of walking pass a continuous walls of images that stretches indefinitely after you do a search. You can use the same unique search interface to search through Flickr, and YouTube and find your results in a wall of images. The shopping search option is particular useful as it not only lists images of the product you are searching for but also include the price and a link to where you buy it. I must say it works very very well. This visually rich experience is achieved through a browser plugin for both IE and Firefox and the the result is indeed a very un-browser like experience.

The layout is not only beautiful but effective. I personally think it is one of the most effective design in terms of searching for and browsing through visually rich contents.

More importantly, what is it good for ? Searching for images and video from multiple sites is an obvious area where you can have a lot of fun. If you are searching for ideas or products and are primarily interest in how it looks, Cooliris can definitely make you life a lot easier and make the search experience more interesting.

As an added bonus, CoolIris also offer an iPhone app version of its search engine which amazingly delivers a similar visual experience using the comparatively much smaller iPhone screen!

Definitely worth checking out!Similar Posts:

Google Helps You Search For The Spoken Words

Felix — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 05:51:00 +0000

If you are like me, you probably have some interest in the 2008 US presidential election. In order to help you make your mind up in terms of who is the better candidate, you might have also been wondering about the position of the two presidential candidates on various issues. Well wonder no more, thanks to Google’s new audio indexing technology (Gaudi), you can search through exactly what the the candidates have said about various issues !

Google has tried to embed (and since taken off) this technology in various parts of YouTube, but I found the best place to test it out to be right from the Google Gaudi Labs Page.

For example, say you are interested in what Obama has said about “NASA”:

Google will find you all the clips where NASA was spoken by Obama (displayed on the left), you can then play the clips on the right hand side. If you click on the play button on the right hand side, Google will even take you directly to the section where NASA was spoken! It doesn”t get easier than this in terms of searching for what the candidates have said about a particular issue. At the moment you can also search through all the videos in the YouTube political channel to finds what any other politicians have said about certain issues, just click on “All Politicians”

Does it work ? Well the transcription is not perfect and the search sometimes find wrongly transcribed word, but it is certainly usable. I suspect the slight hit and miss nature of this technology is what’s holding Google back from general public consumption.

I blogged about Blinkx attempt in trying to index the spoken words, who certainly has a lead in this space of deep indexing of videos. Google is now well and truly venturing into this area, be it slowly and carefully as to not disappoint and damage its rock solid reputation in Search. There is no question that deep indexing of videos and transcription of spoke words has tremendous potential in unleashing the value of more unstructured contents.

BTW, you can also add this technology as a Google gadget at your iGoogle Page.

Check it out and let us know what you think !Similar Posts:

Best Video Search Engine for iPhone

Felix — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:57:00 +0000

iPhone has great web connectivity, beautiful big screen and a built in media and YouTube player so searching for and playing videos on the iPhone is bound to be a killer web app.

Thankfully someone realised this and came up with a very good product: Vtap. Vtap video search engine was built from the ground up for mobile phones and not only index and allow you to search videos from all over the web including YouTube, MySpace, Dailymotion and many others, it then encodes the video on the fly and stream the appropriate format to your phone instantaneously!

I checked it out on my new iPhone and it works brilliantly!

Vtap gets around the problem of no Flash support on the iPhone and plays the video either via the built in YouTube and quick player after encoding the video into iPhone compatible format. The interface is slick and you can also subscribe to certain video feeds similar to the video feeds on YouTube.

Not only is Vtap the best video search app I have seen on any portable devices, I am not also very excited about the bound less possibilities mobile search technology will bring in the future.

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Google’s Innovation Dilemma

Felix — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:08:37 +0000

It’s been a while since Google came up with any innovation around their main search offerings (in fact, I can’t remember what has ever changed since I started using Google search other than some re-arrangement of the results page). On one hand it is a testament to how good Google Search is, on the other hand, you have to ask the question of whether they are playing safe and sticking with what has proven to be winning formula.

I am a firm believer that if you are not making mistakes, then you are not trying hard enough. Google has made plenty of mistakes around various parts of their products portfolios, (i.e Poor acceptance of the original Google Reader which has now become one of the RSS readers) but no one can say that they have made a wrong step when it comes to their main Search offering because they haven’t made any significant changes.

OK, OK, I know Search represent 95% (or is that 99% ?) of Google’s revenue which means it’s something you don’t want to mess around with. Hence the Google Innovation Dilemma, do you stick with the safe option of keeping what works, or do you innovate for the future and the goods of your customer but risk making a wrong step.

Full credits to Google for trying thought.The latest attempt being the Google experimental search views that is available at the moment.

Are they ground breaking innovations ? I personally don’t think so, are they worthwhile feature that help me as a Searcher ? I have reservation on that one as well.

Alternate views for search results

“See results on a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, Google’s technology extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.”

Other than the keywords that Google suggest us to try, I couldn’t get a results that I can see the value of this option.

Keyword suggestions

“As you type your search, Google’s technology provides alternative suggestions to your queries in real time”

This feature has actually been around for a while via the Google toolbar, never found it to be of any value for me.

Keyboard shortcuts

“Navigate search results quickly and easily, minimizing use of your mouse. Current keyboard”

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS AS AN INNOVATION ????!!!!!

contextual search navigation

“contextual search navigation allows you to search deeper in a particular type of content or to search related terms”

This has the potential to be a killer innovation as Google try to cluster the main concepts and type of results and guide you through what you are searching for. For example “Python” can mean either the snake or a programming language and the search engine should recognise that and guide the user and try to understand the difference in concepts as well as the different type of content the user might be interested (code, book, etc.).

I would say these are good attempts by Google, but it still leaves me wanting more, particular around concept based navigation which cluster based search engine such as Clusty does extremely well. Try searching for “bass” and Clusty will suggest and try to work out wether you are searching for Bass (the fish) or Bass (the musical instrument).

I am disappointed with the innovation that Google has released, but I have no doubt they have more radical updates that they are working on. For example, I blogged about SearchMash which is actually Google testing various new Search offerings under a completely different brand. Whether they release these new features at a faster pace and integrate them into their offerings, is the key dilemma that I think Google faces.

What do you think ?Similar Posts:

Search for the Serious Video Search Engine.

Felix — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 05:17:33 +0000

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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