Video search: still crappy, here’s why
Steve Safran August 28th, 2007
You know that 1994 video that turned up recently of Vice President Cheney saying that invading Iraq would turn into a quagmire? Jon Garfunkel at PBS MediaShift wanted to know how it got onto YouTube. (It turns out it was posted by a New York City artist.) In his hunt, Jon looked into the larger question: why is video search so damn lousy? Here’s one answer:
Of the relevant top 60 search results for “Cheney 1994″ on Google video search, all but one of the clips are hosted on YouTube/Google (the other was from Crooks & Liars). None of the derivative clips that aired on network TV were sourced to its respective website; they were only linked to YouTube.
Video is, of course, tough to index. Text is simple. But much of the problem can be blamed on video providers who don’t properly take advantage of software that could pump out tons of metadata, making video search much easier.
3 Comments Add your own
1. Jon Garfunkel | August 28th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Steve,
Thanks for your comments. I’d hesitate to call it all “crappy” though, since the landscape is quite varied. For sure, anyone looking at Google Video search, for example, will be very disappointed. The rest of the landscape are startups who are already indexing feeds from TV networks (Truveo), online footage houses (footage.net) and academic archival projects (VTNA, LoC’s MIC).
Presumably, the MIC XML format can be used by “live” feeds, so a network wouldn’t necessarily distinguish between “news” and “archives.” I’d be curious to here from video providers whether they’re in the loop on LoC’s MIC.
Jon
2. Steve Safran | August 28th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Jon,
You’re being fair and a responsible journalist. You’re looking at this from all sides and trying to avoid sensational language.
I’ll have none of that. Video search is crappy.
Steve
3. JoeMo | August 28th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
Video search is crappy only because content producers don’t take advantage of the some of the tools available to them. I know that where I work we provide CC data(if available) and that can be used for search. I can’t really think of any better data to use for search unless there was manual intervention. But I do agree, video search is lacking the refinement of text search.
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