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Search Battle Heading to Video

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the drawing-the-line-in-the-sand dept.

loid_void wrote to mention a Wired story covering the video search battle between the major portals. From the article: "As millions of broadband subscribers who missed a wardrobe-malfunction moment on TV can attest, the internet can be a convenient resource for finding much-talked-about events on video. Large net portals and a handful of smaller sites are looking to change that. In recent weeks, Yahoo, Google and MSN have each rolled out services designed to make it easier to upload or locate video online. The portals' rollouts come as a handful of startups and independent film sites are creating tools to make putting video online nearly as simple as publishing text."

4 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Improved text search by xiaomonkey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    While being able to search for video and images is great and all, I wonder if much more significant effort should be put into improving plain old text (technically, html/pdf/ps/doc/etc) document retrival?

    It seems that on the major search engines (google/yahoo/msn), there hasn't been any radical improvement in this area since google first came onto the scene.

    And, right now, it's not like these search engines are sufficiently close to perfection yet that there's little room for improvement. For a good number of types of queries, the signal to noisy ratio can be bit too low.

  2. Re:There is a downside... by Jeremi · · Score: 3, Insightful
    What if Mr. Goat-Se or something even worse gets a hold of a video camera!!!


    A good search engine will reliably steer people towards what they are looking for ... so if they are looking for Mr. Goat-Se, they'll get him, and if they aren't looking for him, they won't.


    If people who aren't looking for Mr. Goat-Se end up seeing him "on accident", that's a sign that the search engine sucks.

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  3. Re:Censorship/decency standards by Jeremi · · Score: 3, Insightful
    On the Internet, it's a lot easier to see what you want and avoid what you dislike. The Mormons get their wholesome family crud, and I get my skin flicks and pot jokes. Everybody's happy!


    I like your solution, and I think it will happen eventually, but it's much more politically charged than you realize. If you think that everyone will be happy when it's possible for anyone to get "shit sex videos" on demand (even if they themselves never see them), you've got another think coming -- there are many, many people who think that there are some things that should not be available to anyone. Kiddie porn would be one obvious example.

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  4. Fair use for big corps by Saeger · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Uploading and searching for short video clips certainly qualifies as fair use[1], but for most of the other video that people are searching for, I don't see how a "legitimate" company like Google can get away with indexing it when many others have been shutdown for doing the same thing. Sites like LokiTorrent (dead), ShareReactor (dead), ShareConnector (dead), and even Napster (dead), simply made it easy to search pointers to data, but they were forced offline anyway.

    Google would have a hell of time being a copyright cop; better to leave this function to the constantly shifting "grey" p2p world.

    [1] unless the recent idea of a "permission culture" has overtaken your worldview.

    --
    Power to the Peaceful