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Yahoo Video Search Beta

Posted by michael on from the to-boldly-search-where-no-man-has-searched-before dept.

An anonymous reader sent in some pointers to Yahoo rolling out a video search tool. We've mentioned searching digital video previously, and AltaVista (remember them?) also has a video search available.

34 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Alltheweb by robyannetta · · Score: 5, Informative

    Alltheweb has had a video search for years.

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    - Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
    1. Re:Alltheweb by vidarh · · Score: 2, Informative

      Alltheweb is owned by Overture, which is a subsidiary of Yahoo...

    2. Re:Alltheweb by MarkH · · Score: 3, Informative

      In fact if you compare

      http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=vid&cs=utf8& q= kate+winslet&rys=0

      http://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?ei=UT F- 8&fr=sfp&p=kate+winslet

      You will see remarkable similiarities

    3. Re:Alltheweb by jameszhou2000 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This video search is just based on filename? That's far behind the state-of-art of research. It might be true that content-based video search is still not mature, but at least yahoo can do better than this filename-based search. For example, they can develop some web crawler to extract closed caption and movie title, or make use of the information on the web pages.

  2. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  3. Save some time.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes, you CAN search for the obvious

  4. I've been using AltaVista VidSearch for years by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Welcome to the party Yahoo.

    AltaVista should be sued by Yahoo.

  5. Works pretty well! by miscellaneous_havoc · · Score: 5, Funny

    First thing I searched was "Paris Hilton"... I have to say it brought up quite a few clips of her being interviewed. But it was missing one special clip for me to really give it two thumbs up.

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    Make Love not [Browser] War!
    1. Re:Works pretty well! by Vampyre_Dark · · Score: 3, Informative

      Try AskJolene.com ... you'll find nothing but the right kind of videos. >:)

    2. Re:Works pretty well! by Jugalator · · Score: 2, Funny

      But it was missing one special clip for me to really give it two thumbs up.

      Hmm... The opposite happens if I search for my profession. Aiiiee! Way too much information! Please assassinate that guy, he's giving us a worse name than we've already got. :-(

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    3. Re:Works pretty well! by corbettw · · Score: 3, Funny

      First thing I searched was "Paris Hilton"...

      I just tried this search, too. I was struck by a couple of things:

      1) Man, that chick is skinny! Someone get her a cheeseburger. And I'm not one of those guys who's into so-called "BBW" type women, either. I just don't get into women who have asses like 12 yo boys.
      2) She was, what, 18, when this clip was made? Just goes to show that sometimes enthusiasm is a poor substitute for experience.

      --
      God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
  6. suprnova.org competitor? by CzarMike · · Score: 2, Funny

    So will this beat the badass video search over at http://www.suprnova.org/

    Probably not

    1. Re:suprnova.org competitor? by spac3manspiff · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Cough... copyright violations.. cough

  7. Can't really see this working. by MetalliQaZ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Even if the text that yahoo actually searches can accurately point to an appropriate video, how long with those videos stay on the host server before the they are removed to save on bandwidth wastage. Google's image search is already practially dead, this can't be any better. Good gimmick tho...

    -d

    --
    "Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
    1. Re:Can't really see this working. by MetalliQaZ · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That is exactly what I mean by 'dead'. It hasn't been updated in months. My take on that situation is that Google has just given up on the concept. It is often an interesting game to search for random words like "kitchen" and see how much porn comes up. I always find better pictures by searching 'ordinary' google. Image search doesnt really search images anyway...it searches the text on the page that links to the images. -d

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      "Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
  8. Turn safe search off by enosys · · Score: 4, Informative

    Turn safe search off in advanced search. Then you'll find those clips.

  9. Video search BETA? by HarveyBirdman · · Score: 5, Funny

    Will I be able to search VHS videos soon?

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    --- Ban humanity.
  10. what this really looks like. by joel2600 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    all i'm really seeing here is that it's looking for videos with your keywords in the name of the video or probably on the page related or linked to the video. then it shows you a preview, probably of the first frame of the video.

    is this really that amazing? the people that built the image searches for these engines probably could have done this in a week.

  11. Porn? by HarveyBirdman · · Score: 3, Funny

    What's porn? Did you mistype pr0n?

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    --- Ban humanity.
    1. Re:Porn? by Drakonian · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why do people spell it pr0n? Seriously, I don't get that.

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      Random is the New Order.
    2. Re:Porn? by harmonica · · Score: 2, Informative
      There is a Wikipedia article which also covers pr0n:

      On the Internet pornography is often referred to as pr0n which is misspelled p0rn -- porn written with zero, a common style in a so called leet speak. One theory on the origins of this spelling is that it was devised to fool spam filters which blocked emails with the word "porn" from coming through to the recipient. However, since leet speak has performed similar mutations on a number of words, including those unlikely to feature in unsolicited commercial e-mails (0wned, r00t, n00b, d00d), it is likely that any transformation of "porn" to "pr0n" for spamming purposes is at best an independent invention.
  12. remember.. by minus_273 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    scour media search about 3 years back. It was wonderfun until it started killing servers.

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    The war with islam is a war on the beast
    The war on terror is a war for peace
  13. Search Hotlist by (+o+)+o+)'s · · Score: 2, Insightful

    1. pr0n 2. beheadings 3. porn ( for the occasional viewer who isnt in with the new terminology ) 4. Paris Hilton ....You see where this is heading. Yahoo is gonna go back to its early days when people were using it specifically for searching out pics of Pamela Anderson. Not that I am complaining, but what good do they actually think they are going to do people. All it will do is cause these geeks to stay in front of their computers for more extended periods of time, not that I am complaining, and also cause alot of bogus redirects. Or will turn into what Kazaa is, fake files. Other than that, I will be using it for new movie releases. YAY!!! Long Live the Cam man!

    1. Re:Search Hotlist by joblessjunkie · · Score: 2, Interesting
      That's a bit shortsighted. Just because the most popular content is of the adult variety, that doesn't mean it has no utility at all.

      We are fast approaching a day when all manner of film and television content comes to us over the internet. Much of it already does. Yahoo and Google know this, and they aren't planning to let that market go uncontested.

      Now, Jon Stewart on Crossfire, anyone?

  14. Karma whore? by Jugalator · · Score: 4, Funny

    So this (disable safe search) is how a karma whore looks. Wow...

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    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    1. Re:Karma whore? by corbettw · · Score: 4, Funny

      The goggles! They do nothing!

      --
      God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
  15. Not immediately useful. by FreeLinux · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In its present state this tool isn't much more useful than a regular Google search. However, if and when there is extensive meta data indexing the actual content of the video it becomes tremendously useful. Imagine the ability to search for something and be able to locate a specific 30 second portion of a 2 hour long video. Wouldn't that be handy?

  16. Based on AltaVista's technology? by janaagaard · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is Yahoo's video search based on AntaVista's technology? It seems to me that the results are identical.

  17. Well... by GarfBond · · Score: 3, Informative

    Seeing as how Yahoo owns Overture, which owns AltaVista, I think it's pretty easy to see where this new video search comes from. :)

  18. A better video search by Hiawatha · · Score: 2, Informative

    Check out this one. It's really impressive.

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    Hiawatha Bray

    Tech Reporter

    Boston Globe

  19. they crawled me the other day by mr_burns · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The first I heard of this I was tailing my access log (people were swarming some videos on my site) and within minutes of somebody with a yahoo mail referrer following a link to my page, yahoo scraped all the video on my site... but with a special av crawler.

    So yeah, if you don't want yahoo's spider eating up your bandwidth, you can block it (or maybe set up your server so that they get tiny files) and not block yahoo wholesale.

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    "Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
  20. I think it's a simple meme by HarveyBirdman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, the story *I* heard was that someone, somewhere (it's usually described as a pre-WWW Usenet post- probably written on a papyrus scroll) typed it that way accidently, a few people on the same thread copied it, and it sort of took off from there. That's my preferred theory, anyway, as I like memetics.

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    --- Ban humanity.
  21. Yahoo owns Inktomi, Altavista, and Alltheweb! by mrklin · · Score: 2, Informative
    Actually, to be exact, Yahoo bought Inktomi. Overture bought Altavista and Alltheweb. Yahoo then bought Overture.

    With algorithms from three very good search engines under its belt in addition to its own directory data, Yahoo later announced it is foregoing its relationship with Google. Coincidence? Of course not.

    For what it is worth, my search results from Yahoo is just as good as the ones from Google, sometimes better, sometimes worse. It seems like the only place where you can got poor search results nowadays is from MSN search!

  22. Huh? by boodaman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Video Search"? The tool does no such thing. A true "video search" tool would take a query like "blue farmhouses" or "red barns" and return a list of all the videos that have blue farmhouses or red barns IN the video, and the actual location (hours, minutes, seconds, frame) in the video where those things can be found. A true "video search" tool would also be able to index and search dialogue in the video itself.

    All this thing is doing is indexing meta data about the videos that was contributed by a human. Just about worthless, if you ask me, and certainly nothing to get excited about.