16 « September « 2008 « AltSearchEngines

Search the Actual Video, Not its Title

September 16th, 2008 by Rafi Farber
Posted in Reviews, Verticals | No Comments »

Let’s make this clear, folks. Text comprises basically 26 pieces of information jumbled together in specific patterns to convey information. Videos, on the other hand, are millions upon millions of pieces of information smushed together for the same purpose. Compared to the latter, a search for the former seems almost childish. And, when you really think about it, doesn’t the fact that your search for video depends on 26 bits of text depress you just a little bit? I’m sad just writing about it. You should see my face.

The folks at VideoSurf were also sad, but the good thing about that is they had the capital, brain-size, and tenacity to actually do something about it. So they figured out how to make video searchable not through the mere accidental content of its title that somebody just decided to label it for whatever reason he felt like (like YouTube, which VideoSurf happens to use as one of its databases), but through the primary nature of the video itself, what it is actually displaying pictorally. It’s the way nature intended video search to be.

They also allow visually navigation through their results to find the specific scenes, people or moments they most want to see. Result –less time searching, more entertainment. Look at the picture below to see what I mean.

This was the result of a search for Palin ABC Interview. The series of moments on the bottom of each link lead to different parts of the interview, allowing me to more easily pinpoint the part I want to watch. And if you want, they have another search view option. This one:

VideoSurf also allws a search by character. Keeping in line with the example we have here of the Sarah Palin Charles Gibson interview, the top row of your search will give you the option to search for videos only with Sarah Palin in them, or Charles Gibson. This obviously becomes more useful when you’re looking for an actor or actress and scenes from movies they played in.

Some other features: Show only faces. Checking the “Show Only Faces” box does two things. It changes the visual summary (shown above) to include only faces so that you can see exactly who appeared in the video. It also eliminates results from your result set that don’t include any faces (like videos that are all landscape, without any people’s faces featured).

Category narrowing allows you to include or exclude videos that fall within a certain content type (ex. Slideshows, TV Full Episodes, Full Movies) or genre (ex. Funny Videos, News Videos, Music Videos, Celebrity Videos, Sports Videos, etc).

You can sort by relevance, popularity, freshness, and the length of the video. This last feature was especially helpful in getting a full version of the Palin interview. I sorted by longest first, and got the full interview (divided into three parts) in one of the first links.

One final feature that VideoSurf has is the “Save Search to My Homepage” button that appears at the top of any search result page. They’ll save the search terms you used plus any additional filters that you selected (like video sources or categories you excluded) and you can access it from the “My Searches” tab on your VideoSurf homepage.

Right now they are in stealth mode, with invitation being handed out to testers. Fill in your email address at their homepages to get one.

Yasni & 123people People search German style

September 16th, 2008 by Guest Author
Posted in Global, Guest Authors, Reviews, Verticals | 2 Comments »

By Guest Author Juergen Plieninger, who generously translated these German search engines.

Searching for names and people must generate better results than the results of a search with the name as phrase (in parenthesis) in a common search engine. And the same must be afforded for image search.

Recently in Germany, with yasni and 123people, two effective people search engines entered the search market. They have a similar performance to each other, but have each other their differences. Yasni only offers a search interface in German (but it is easy for foreigners to type in the name and to interpret the results), while 123people also offers search interfaces in English, French and Italian. Yasni orders the results merely in one column, 123people in categories. Yasni has the option to relate results to specific persons, 123peoples doesn’t mind about how many people are represented in the results – the searcher himself must separate and reassign them to relevant people. But let me first present to you both search engines, before I compare them with each others’ search interfaces.

123people is a kind of meta search engine, mixing its own data with those of conventional search engines. If you load 123people with the top level domain.de, the German search interface will be loaded, with .com the US view. The choice of countries, which you can choose below the input field, is international, as options you have Germany, Austria, Switzerland, USA and the world. But it doesn’t really matter, I can find American people with the German search interface, with 80 % of the available results in the U.S. interface.
Well, you insert the names, user acronyms, perhaps with the town, where the person lives or works – and search!

The results are presented in several categories. These categories are constantly expanded. A headline gives information about the number of results in the several categories. Under the headline, the image results are displayed. Then the categories are ordered in two columns. On the left, results of e-mail-addresses, weblinks, blog contents and biographical contents are located, on the right telephone numbers, chat/microblogging results, videos, a tagcloud, news services and documents. The footer is the category of results from social services like facebook, myspace and so on. The categories are well sized, if there are more results, you have the option to display more results.The presentation of results is transparent in title and content description.

The value of a search with 123people can be described with a clear categorized meta search with a well ordered display of results without having the feeling of being overwhelmed with information. A bit negative is the sometimes inserted advertisement of promotion of services with costs of 123people.

The effort one must make is to order results to several persons, especially in the case of common names or of persons not so well known. You can see this effect particularly at the results of images, if for example you’re searching for a woman and the image shows a man. Not every time is this effect is so evident. (Only in the case of video search results, the evidence is given.I seldom found a relevant result in this category!) That means: You must invest time and carefulness to evaluate the results. For this, the tag cloud is sometimes helpful, when you can choose items to refine your search.

yasni on the other hand tries to solve the dilemma of the correlation of the results to real persons in the manner to order the results in one column and to invoke the user to correlate several results to a profile of a person. Will that work? It’s the old experiment of somewhat social services, to let the user make the work, but it works only, if the user has clear advantages of this. We will see!

The results are arranged to the several sources they came from. It is possible to reorder them with tabs in the categories; private, profession, and others. At the right side the options are offered to refine or broaden the search, a tag cloud and image results and an option to find people of the persons network. Also here is a clear user interface, but not so enriched and structured like 123people. And the number of results is limited, no matter in which category you click at “more results” a new window pops up and offers more results by sending an e-mail some times later.

Both personal search engines are offering results, that are not (so easily) available in usual search engines. A part of this effect is due to the examination of special sources, for example of social forums, another part is due to the transparent presentation of relevant results. Anyway one always gets results for examples of people mentioned seldomly in the web. Here they are easy to discover as they are in the results of usual search engines.

If we compare the two with other popular people search engines, they also look beneficially: Spock is overloaded with advertisement, but gives more information about networks of people and topics, offers the possibility to label entries with tags and the subscription of RSS-feeds. On the other side is ZoomInfo, a deep digging service in the sectors of VIP- and economy- people search, but it is overwhelming with the mass of results. There are the both yasni and 123people in the middle, like – for example – pipl.