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Getting the most from your camcorder: tips, tricks, and new products for those who want to take better videos.
Camcorders, Tech and Random Rants Blog
Getting the most from your camcorder: tips, tricks, and new products for those who want to take better videos.
May 10, 2008 9:00 AM
Posted by Joseph Devlin
Testing Video Search Engines
Posted by Joseph Devlin
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We all know the web is sloshing full of digital video. How can you find just the right video in an ocean full of choices? Opinions about which video search tools work best vary widely. So I decided to create a quick test to provide a more objective measure of success. I started by compiling a list of the video search tools I had seen other bloggers recommending. Next I created a list of specific videos I wanted each tool to look for. I asked each tool to look for each video using search terms that worked well on the service that hosted that video.
My rating for each search engine (1 star for each correct hit of my five test videos.) AOL Video * * * * * Blinkx * * SearchforVideo * Fooooo * *  I love iTunes, but I find that the iTunes search tools get harder to use with each new release. The iTunes podcast directory search tool found the IBM video podcast, but I know the service well. I suspect most people would not even find that. The main iTunes search tool found some older episodes of Battlestar Galactica, but new episodes of the show have moved to Hulu.com and AOL video and were not listed in iTunes. Google Video Search * * * The search engine built into Google Video did a better job than the YouTube search engine. It found the two videos hosted on Google Video and the McDonald's video hosted on sister site YouTube. It found promos for the TV show, but not the episode itself. Hulu.com * If you haven't tried Hulu.com you are missing a great free video on demand service. Hulu offers free streaming video of more than 400 TV shows and movies, primarily from NBC and FOX and affiliated cable networks (USA Network, Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, Sci Fi, Style, Sundance, G4, and Oxygen). The video it offers is also much higher resolution than found on YouTube. On the other hand, the built-in search engine only finds Hulu content (such as the Battlestar Galactica show I was looking for.) Hence the low rating as a general purpose video search engine. GENERAL SEARCH TOOLS Google * * * * * Almost a year ago I was meeting with a client, a large publisher of video podcasts. I advised him to pay closer attention to what Google was revealing about his podcasts. "Joe you just don't get it" he told me. "Google does not index podcasts". "Not entirely true" I told him. "Google has got some skunk projects that are starting to look closely at video feeds. More importantly Google crawls almost every website. If you are offering video that is fed from an Internet landing page or if you include show notes about a video on the web, your casts are going to be found by Google." He argued I was being dense until I asked him to do Google search on one of his episodes. "See" he beamed at me "look at the terrible results Google is providing. It has found all this old screwed up material we fixed long ago and lots of comments critical of my podcasts. I don't want anyone to see any of this stuff!." "And what are they seeing when they do a Google search" I asked. "Oh" he said and spend the next hour yelling at his webmaster. It is certainly true that a plain vanilla Google search does not provide as good a video search as Truveo does. Yes, Google found every video I asked it to find, but it also returned lots of other related info. If you run a business that uses on-line video, you need to keep tabs on what sort of results straight Google searches produce. If you are looking for video and only video, you are probably better off using Truveo. The interface is streamlined for video and it provides a variety of search criteria not available in a straight Google search. Technorati Tags:
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