Yahoo Video Search Beta

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.

Alltheweb

[robyannetta]

Alltheweb [alltheweb.com] has had a video search for years.

Re:Alltheweb

[vidarh]

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

Re:Alltheweb

[MarkH]

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

Re:Alltheweb

[jameszhou2000]

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.

Re:Alltheweb

[Jugalator]

This video search is just based on filename?

Nope. Search for "slashdot" for example.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Porn?

[HarveyBirdman]

What's porn? Did you mistype pr0n?

Re:Porn?

[Drakonian]

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

Re:Porn?

[harmonica]

There is a Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] 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

I think it's a simple meme

[HarveyBirdman]

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.

Re:I think it's a simple meme

[Eric S Raymond]

I always thought it was wordplay on Tron.

Re:I think it's a simple meme

[Narcissus]

I started spelling it pron for the simple fact that I didn't need my girlfriend searching for any directories with "porn" in their name on my computer.

After that, the whole leet thing turned it into pr0n. Along with the fact that my g/f started hearing my mates and I talking about "pron", so needed to make sure she couldn't search for that, either...

Re:I think it's a simple meme

[idontgno]

Nonsense. Instant deniability. You're talking about seafood. [wikipedia.org]

Re:I think it's a simple meme

[Bullet-Dodger]

Nonsense. Instant deniability. You're talking about seafood.

Well, what with the nature of the conversation, convincing her that you mean prawn creates a host of problems in itself. Sufficed to say, I'm no longer allowed at Seaworld.

HA!

[leonmergen]

HA! Obviously you aren't teh l33t, otherwise you would understand...

Re:Porn?

[tacokill]

Because "porn" is the first search term that any good person would use when sitting down to a new computer to explore.

Well, at least that's what my friends tell me. :-/

Re:Porn?

[pchan-]

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

the origin for this is pretty simple: so that system administrators doing a search for "porn" either in file names or grepping through logs or email will not find your porn. think back to the time when most people did not have a personal computer, certainly not one capable of networking. they had shared systems (especially at colleges and labs) or bbs accounts.

Save some time..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you CAN search for the obvious [yahoo.com]

Re:Save some time..

[beef3k]

Only 79 results? Worst search engine ever

Re:Save some time..

[lowrydr310]

Ah.. I remember a day when "felafel meningitis" turned up exactly ONE google result. Now there are 17!!!

http://www.googlewhack.com/ [googlewhack.com]

Re:Save some time..

[bsharitt]

Turn off safe search.

I've been using AltaVista VidSearch for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the party Yahoo.

AltaVista should be sued by Yahoo.

Re:I've been using AltaVista VidSearch for years

[vidarh]

Altavista is owned by Yahoo.

Re:I've been using AltaVista VidSearch for years

[siavash_of_stockholm]

...and (perhaps unfortunately) Yahoo is to be owned by Google

Re:I've been using AltaVista VidSearch for years

[coolfrood]

...and (perhaps unfortunately) Yahoo is to be owned by Google

You mean, Pwn3d, don't you?

Works pretty well!

[miscellaneous_havoc]

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.

Re:Works pretty well!

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously didn't get the searchhquery right [yahoo.com]

It's acutally a couple of clips there.. enjoy ;-)

Turn safe search off

[enosys]

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

Re:Works pretty well!

[DikSeaCup]

You probably just need additional search terms to narrow results.

Of course, that just leaves itself open for some more amusing results ...

"Paris Hilton" "dumb move" - she's had so many of those ...
"Paris Hilton" "night vision" - that would be dead on
"Paris Hilton" "sex" - I think that would still be too general ..

Re:Works pretty well!

[Vampyre_Dark]

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

Re:Works pretty well!

[Jugalator]

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 [yahoo.com]. Aiiiee! Way too much information! Please assassinate that guy, he's giving us a worse name than we've already got. :-(

Re:Works pretty well!

[filtur]

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.

I was only able to give one thumb up....

Re:Works pretty well!

[corbettw]

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.

Re:Works pretty well!

[atrizzah]

Two thumbs, and another part of your anatomy as well

Safe Search is off...

[Donoho]

Nuff Said

suprnova.org competitor?

[CzarMike]

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

Probably not

Re:suprnova.org competitor?

[spac3manspiff]

Cough... copyright violations.. cough

Can't really see this working.

[MetalliQaZ]

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

Re:Can't really see this working.

[which way is up]

I don't fully understand why googles image search is 'dead'. Though the cache hasn't been updated in a while the search still works. And it shouldn't fall victim to your previous statement becaue unless web developers top using images, there should always be images to crawl and cache.

Re:Can't really see this working.

[MetalliQaZ]

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

Re:Can't really see this working.

[Ron Bennett]

Archive.org comes in handy for grabbing some deleted images - it takes much patience though waiting and some skill/luck with searching.

Yahoo image search finds most of what Google image search does and is more up to date; Google doesn't rule the search space.

Ron Bennett

or worse...

[tacokill]

Or worse, how long before I rename my videos to Paris_hilton_sex_romp.mov? Sure seems ripe for spammers and their ilk to take advantage (once again)....

just tried it...nothing interesting

[djeddiej]

I am not sure why the product is really beta when variations of this have been available on the web for many years. I also noticed that the layout is very similar to google image searching. Do all these search engines use google layout?

Deja Vu

[rxiv]

Is this powered by Google? The layout similarity is a little, google-ish, if it's not.

Video search BETA?

[HarveyBirdman]

Will I be able to search VHS videos soon?

Re:Video search BETA?

[PhreakinPenguin]

I was wondering the same thing. I'm still trying to find a quality copy of Rad.

Funny

[mithridate]

So now whenever you need a good laugh just do a video search for funny [yahoo.com] .

When you want to feel better about yourself do a search for stupid [yahoo.com].

And, when you want some nerd love do a search for, well I'll leave that one to you...

It sucks for sure

[yogikoudou]

Results 1 - 20 of about 49 for pr0n.

Re:It sucks for sure

[samekt]

Did you mean: porn [yahoo.com]

what this really looks like.

[joel2600]

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.

Re:what this really looks like.

[xyzzy]

Yup, this is definitely not what I would call "video search" -- it's "searching for videos". You don't get any apparent access to the actual content of the video.

Re:what this really looks like.

[tekunokurato]

Have YOU sent spiders out to index all the video files on the internet? If so, will you update the list with regularity? No, it's not exceptional, but it is a great service.

Useless

[tehJR]

A search for 'sex' only finds videos about 'Same Sex Marriages' and similar useless internet babble.
___
i was the walrus [blogspot.com]

remember..

[minus_273]

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

Re:remember..

[pchan-]

at scour.net (later .com too) had this 6 years ago, with animated previews (six frames out of the video in an animated gif). heh, we used to run everyone's desktop machines at night to generate the video previews.

Does it cover .torrent files?

[faramir_fr]

It would be good to have a nice centralized search of chinese/russian/*whatever* trackers. :)

Search Hotlist

[( o ) o )'s]

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

Re:Search Hotlist

[jawtheshark]

Who uses Kazaa for pr0n anyways? For your daily fresh dose of pr0n, just go to thehun.com [thehun.com]. For some things, a regularly updated list is more than enough...

Re:Search Hotlist

[joblessjunkie]

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?

Karma whore?

[Jugalator]

So this [yahoo.com] (disable safe search) is how a karma whore looks. Wow...

Re:Karma whore?

[REBloomfield]

my eeeeyes.......

Re:Karma whore?

[corbettw]

The goggles! They do nothing!

Not immediately useful.

[FreeLinux]

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?

Re:Not immediately useful.

[rokzy]

not ever going to happen though is it?

people can't even copy the names of songs correctly from the back of a CD case to an mp3 filename (when I use CDDB I spend almost as much time fixing mistakes as it would have taken to type it myself).

what makes you think they're going to bother with the kind of data necessary to reliably locate a specific video in the first place, let alone some clip within a video?

Re:Not immediately useful.

[smacktits]

I'm really glad to see that I'm not the only one who is very particular about correctly naming their mp3s. ID3 tags too, for that matter.

Re:Not immediately useful.

[corbettw]

It's going to be a long time before AI advances to the point where you could say "Computer, find me the clip of the Madonna song where she pretended to masturbate the first time", or "Computer, find me a copy of the unedited Zapruder tape, the one that shows the driver shooting Kennedy in the face*". Despite what CSI may have led you to believe, computers can't quite do that yet.

*Yes, it's true, in the unedited Zapruder tape, you can clearly see the driver turn around and pop a cap into his face, afterward

Re:Not immediately useful.

[harmonica]

In the older /. story linked to in the abstract, there is mentioning of using closed-caption texts in combination with the video material to enable searching for spoken texts. This should be relatively easy to implement

I hope it works better for pr0n than a real search

[Smilin]

Do you know how many times "The Daily Show" has clowned Donald Rumsfeld in 2004 according to Yahoo! Video Search?

Once.

Search on: "daily show" rumsfeld

When will google do it?

[siavash_of_stockholm]

This might be a good way for Yahoo to get some of the Google users to start using the search engine, and not only for videos. But as soon as google brings up theire Video search I doubt that the average joe will even bother trying Yahoo's video search. As mentioned above other search engines has had this service for a long time and people have never bothered.

Re:When will google do it?

[saddino]

Who's willing to bet that Google will release their tool (probably with their oft-used "beta" tag) ASAP to steal Yahoo's thunder?

Re:When will google do it?

[Zareste]

Well it rocks so far. Tons of results.

Someone said other engines have had this before. Why hadn't I heard? I'm in hog Heaven right now.

Re:When will google do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only on Slashdot people are deluded enough to think that Google somehow has the search market locked up.

Ahem (source: Nielsen//NetRatings):

According to Nielsen//NetRatings, Google has a 44 percent share of the search market, followed by Yahoo! with 18 percent, MSN with 11, America Online, which uses Google AdSense, with 7 percent, and AskJeeves with 4 percent.

Based on AltaVista's technology?

[janaagaard]

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

• Search for Paris Hilton on AltaVista [altavista.com]
• Search for Paris Hilton on Yahoo [yahoo.com]

Re:Based on AltaVista's technology?

[spac3manspiff]

they could have used the same search algorithem or just bought out the company.

let's see a show of hands

[j1mmy]

how many people searched for boobs?

Re:let's see a show of hands

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes please, BOTH hands, as a matter of fact...

Well...

[GarfBond]

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

Re:Well...

[phoebe]

Lets play 'Spot the Difference', searching for "Chocolate Factory", hoping to find trailers of Johnny Depp's new film:

Yahoo [yahoo.com]

Altavista [altavista.com]

Now I can actually find the Star Wars Kid!

[Devi0s]

SWK Rules!

yahoo should create...

[m2bord]

those folks should just go ahead and create auto-search buttons for the most obvious video search terms, pamela anderson, paris hilton, jenna jamison, etc...

that way users won't have to burn off extra energy trying to remember how to spell their names.

I'm not very impressed

[Will2k_is_here]

Consider these results:
Don't Copy that Floppy [yahoo.com] !?!? and...
pathetic [yahoo.com]

A better video search

[Hiawatha]

Check out this one. [blinkx.tv] It's really impressive.

Not a big deal...

[nherc]

Google could do this very easily as well...

It's not like this thing is scanning the videos with some type of image filtering algorithm or AI. It's just looking for your keyword in the title of the video, the link or the body of a page it finds *.mpg or *.avi's on and snapping a pic of the first frame.

Nothing new here... although I suppose it could be useful. However, my quick research on 'tits' yielded very unsatisfactory results. So, I guess YMMV.

bah

[Anonymous Coward]

bah "hot teenage eskimo cheerleaders" gets nada useless bah cookies, bah, default should be no censor, double bah

real video search

[webharmonics]

Its simple and not meant to scour the web, but we've been doing some very useful video search for about 4 yrs now. But you a need a transcript that is synched. Check one of the clips found here - http://www.rften.org/meeting_presidents.php [rften.org]

big piece of crap

[l3v1]

These searching tools stand nothing close to good video searching. Video searching is when you make a query for football games like: green background, horizontal camera motion and multiple motions in the lower half.

Or when you say, I wish to find all the videos from the last 30 years with a specific theme or content.

There have begun to emerge sorts of MPEG-7-based video database/library applications and solutions, both indexing-wise and query-wise. And only this seems today the right way to gather large

Doesn't this look like another search engine....

[whoopass]

Wow. I never thought I'd go to an URL with yahoo.com in it and look at a UI that looks exactly like a competitor [google.com].

they crawled me the other day

[mr_burns]

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.

Re:they crawled me the other day

[iantri]

It seems to display only a snapshot of a frame of video. Out of curiosity, did it download the whole file(s) or just a small chunk to grab a frame?

It would be pretty irresponsible of Yahoo to write a spider that downloads complete videos from peoples' websites.

Re:they crawled me the other day

[mr_burns]

You know, I really didn't follow up on it much after I saw the hits. At the time, I was tailing the logs to see where all these visitors were coming from all of a sudden. Yahoo was a drop in the bucket compared to the load the site was under from new visitors.

So I guess it was a bit hasty for me to say they scraped it all. They did a get for each of the files. I just sent in feedback asking how they do this to see if they grab the whole thing or just a portion and metadata.

Re:they crawled me the other day

[mr_burns]

I got a response from yahoo. A form response that had nothing to do with my question. Wankers!

Note Geared for Professionals

[PhillC]

I was really hoping that this service would be useful for professional researchers working in agencies and broadcasters for example. But it would seem that this isn't the case.

I conducted a simple search for the word "stoats" - let's pretend I'm putting together a wildlife documentary on the weasel's lesser known cousin.

Yahoo video search comes up with two results - http://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?p=stoa t s&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&save=0

Yet, if I search for stoats on BBC Motion Gallery [bbcmotiongallery.com]

So does AllTheWeb

[Sebby]

So does AllTheWeb [alltheweb.com] for a long time already

Funny how they're not mentioned, again (same as when Google Images was announced)

Yahoo owns Inktomi, Altavista, and Alltheweb!

[mrklin]

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!

Search FOR, now what about search IN

[thenut77]

So when will a tool for searching in a video come out?

I want a picture search.

[h3]

No, not like Google images.

Say I have a picture with a meaningless filename and no identifying marks on it. And I really want to find the more info on the artist/photographer/subject. I want to post the image to some picture search service and it'll spit out results of similar pictures. By "similar", I mean like GQView's similarity feature, which is pretty keen, and frankly magical to me.

Does anyone know of a service like this?

Huh?

[boodaman]

"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.

Tried to find a snippet of 'Debbie does Dallas'

[crovira]

I'm not impressed.

Re:I wonder if the beta...

[djeddiej]

I wonder when google beta will release an alpha of the yahoo search engine?

Re:Weak. It can't even find

[REBloomfield]

didn't know this was videoed. there's tons of clips man, isn't that enough?