Science Videos Search Engine

Rami writes "ScienceHack is a search engine for science videos. What makes ScienceHack unique is that every video is screened by a scientist or an engineer to verify the video's accuracy and quality. ScienceHack focuses on many topics including physics, chemistry and biology. If you go to YouTube to search for videos, you will get spam videos and comments and many conspiracy and low quality videos. ScienceHack has none of that. ScienceHack currently supports videos from YouTube, Google videos and Metacafe."
http://sciencehack.com/

Comments

Finally what we all need,

[kaufmanmoore]

Because scientists are never wrong!

recommended intro science videos for kids

[artifex2004]

I suggest videos from Professor Julius Sumner Miller.

Peer review?

[Christianson]

There's nothing on the site, as far as I can see, that gives any details about how they select the scientists who are going to moderate the videos. The closest I can find is their blog, which suggests that their criterion, however, they find them, is just that they be at least a current undergraduate student in a science-related discipline.

Given that Sciencehack is only really aiming to be a Youtube for science, maybe this doesn't really mean very much. Still, a little more openness about the process would have been encouraging.

Partial matching

[benhocking]

I had to see if you were lying or not, and unfortunately, you weren't. The searching technique relies on partial matching, so "paris" is found in "comparison", and an OR match is used to "hilton" is not required. Thankfully, searching on "paris hilton" in quotes returns no hits.

Re:The Media

[ScrewMaster]

Yeah, no kidding. Although, when you get right down to it, the media people aren't necessarily stupid or ignorant ... what they are is self-serving. They have numerous sources they could use to check their content, and I'm sure they do. But they go ahead and publish that unfounded nonsense anyway because it makes money, and it makes money because We, The People, would rather be entertained than informed. That's going to cost us.

They say we get the government we deserve: I guess that also applies to our news organizations. Not that I perceive much difference between the two any longer, given the number of serious domestic issues we're facing right now that get little or no coverage in mainstream media. Or if they do get covered, they get it exactly wrong.

Back on topic, ScienceHack is an interesting idea, with some promise. I mean, wow, a site with science videos reviewed by actual scientists? Well, maybe almost scientists (grad students and so forth), but still, that's pretty cool. Granted, all scientists are not of equal caliber, but nevertheless having at least the obvious crap weeded out is a good thing for anyone interested in the subject. Certainly YouTube isn't going to bother filtering out the baloney.