Microsoft’s Windows Live Search group launched their Video search last night (Note the beta address in the URL: beta.search.live.com) Nathan Weinberg, Don Dodge, and Michael Arrington appear to give the new service the nod from a UI and Ajax perspective. I though am more interested on the “content” side.
A quick search of videos for “Tablet PC” and sure enough there are about 10 pages of videos (10 videos listed per page). The first hit is a 2004 Channel 9 video of Peter LeForte (from the Tablet team) showcasing the SP2 new Tablet features. I guess that makes sense. Turns out that, though, that most of the video links are to other Channel9 videos. And that’s where the “search” has lost me.
Where are all of the great GottaBeMobile InkShows? Come on.
Yes, this is a “beta,” but from my admittedly quick test (by the way a search for UMPC does no better), this appears to be more of a UI preview than a focus on video search itself.
Here’s what concerns me: The TechMeme set appears to be praising the Video search beta for its simple, clean UI–I guess in the tradition of Google. However, let’s step back to the early Google and recall what its simplicity was an indication of–that Google had spent more time and focus on its indexing. The Live team appears to be going the other way. Yes, I’ll qualify this again, that Live Video search is in beta–although again, I’d call this a UI preview.
Anyway, here are a couple more suggestions I have for the Live Video search team:
* Is Video search really that similar to text-slash-image search? I don’t think so. I expect more temporal results when searching for generic information. Maybe that’s just me. (I did find more timely information via a “Lebanon” search I noticed. It even lists a video from August 25th as its top hit. That’s more like it.) A prominent option that lets me Sort by Date would be very welcome.
* A related point–at least for me–is that I think Video “search” should be more tightly integrated with the News service. With broadband being so prevalent, I want to see links to videos with the itemized news stories. If there’s a newsflash that a plane is attempting an emergency landing, I want an accompanying link to a video that shows that story. Better yet, I want a link to a live stream that’s talking about the story right then (if one exists). During the Vista launch, I want to be able to go to a news site that says “Vista Officially Launched” and see right next to it a link to the live streaming of the presentation if it’s taking place right then. (Anyone else have as much problems as I do finding links to these kinds of live webcasts!?)
* And this brings me to a third point–I’d like to see Cable/TV broadcast videos integrated more. Google tried this early on, but their implementation was lacking. There’s a great opportunity to lead in the convergence here. There’s tons of potential on the indexing as well as the query side.
* And then there’s community…A great Video search engine is going to figure out a way to leverage and expose videos that people want to share. YouTube is one implementation and is particularly good at archiving and streaming videos that you can pop into web pages or share in other ways. However, if you take away the blogs and their links, most of the things I’d never find. This also points out, once again, the need for better blogging search within Live itself.
* Finally, along the lines of “news aggregators,” I’d like to see a “video aggregators.” Whether they are based on archived content listings or concatenated channel-like content, I think there’s an opportunity here to do something different that I’d really like. Google’s News service taught me something about search. For a long time, I’d realized how important time was to information that I searched–so much so that I wanted a temporal based Internet search. I realized that many times I wanted to search for things going on right now. However, news.google.com demonstrated that sometimes the best “search” is an aggregator. I imagine the same principle applies with other media content.
* Oh, here’s another “finally”….actually more of a dream on par with Google’s dream of indexing the world of print. I want to be able to find anything, easily, in any video or movie, broadcast or achived anywhere. I want snippets. I want archives of classroom presentations. I want to know what’s going on right now, live. I want to make it ten times easier to find that part of a movie which had some actor that I can’t recall the name of but I’d really like to include a picture of in my blog. If it was broadcast, Tivo’d, webcast, archived in a library, I’d like to be able to get to it. Ten times faster. Ten times easier. Ten times cheaper.
It’s great to see Microsoft work on video searching–especially since video is becoming more and more a part of the Internet experience. I’ve been noticing that I’m watching more and more “videos” online and sharing video links with others a lot too. Services that make this easier are very timely.