Comparing and Rating Video Search Engines
While Google/YouTube may change the dynamic of video search, it’s still hopelessly frustrating to find a video online. Wall Street Journal writer Jessica Vascellaro wrote a nice article on video search today. I liked it not just because it was the first time I’ve been mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. The article shows that companies have made significant efforts to address search. Ironically I can’t find the article online. But it’s titled “Finding Tom Cruise (Not Cruise Missiles). Have a go.
Inspired by the piece, I did my own comparisons of the online video search websites she referenced (and one she didn’t- Videoronk.com). My methodology was simple. I searched on my username (Nalts) which I also use to tag every video I upload to any video site. If nothing showed up, I can assume that the engine is crawling neither the username nor the tags, which means it’s not effective. If that failed, I tried a few of the unique titles I have for my videos.
In general all of the sites were poor at finding my videos. Results were incomplete, and they are based purely on the metadata (titles, tags, etc.) which I provide when I upload them. Eventually sites will convert speech to text and that will help. But it will be a long while before these operate with the success of search engines looking for text.
The ratings are in the image above. The winner by a mile is Videoronk. While it only indexes a small portion of my videos (and other people that have tried it), it’s still outperforming the other search tools). Purevideo was in second place because it also has links to each online-video site’s top videos. Pixsy was marginal, and Blinkx.com has actually gotten worse since the last time I used it.
Honorable mentions go to AOL Video and Yahoo Video — both video sites index videos beyond those on their site. Ironically, Yahoo Video ranked my Blip.tv videos higher than those that I uploaded on Yahoo Video. Revver seemed to be the online-video site that was most searchable by these engines. All but Blinkx.com found my Revver videos (which is ironic because Blinkx.com established a partnership with Revver earlier this year).
I didn’t include Metacafe in this test because it’s a destination site, but it’s planning some advanced search features like language translation in search. We can only hope that Google will start to do a better job of indexing YouTube videos and videos on other sites.
For now the easiest way to find a video is to start with YouTube, and then hit Videoronk if you don’t find it.
I was doing Videoronk wrong. I was searching “ALL”. I got much better results searching each destination site separately. Blinkx appears abandoned. I never understood Pixsy. I like Purevideo’s ‘Top Ten” lists. I’m going to have to zardoz it like you revvered them.
Oh crap, I was doing Pixsy wrong, too. Wasn’t there a Revver blog that implied Pixsy was a place to upload video? Hallucinations. I don’t think I can stand these culture depravation DTs much longer.
I’m not sure where to post this, so I’ll post it here. Everyone who signed up for MetaCafe payments through Payoneer, check to see if they did your transaction properly. Instead of paying me $755, they charged me $755, and now I have very little left in my bank account that I’m very worried about making other payments on time. I’ve contacted MetaCafe via three of their email addresses, and I will call Payoneer tomorrow. Any other advice on who I should call? Nalts, do you have any MetaCafe phone numbers?
They needed that money to cover Nalts’ commissions. Thank Visnu MetaC rejected all of my videos.
Check to see if they paid you twice and debited you once. That’s pretty funny. Now I’ve got to start checking my bank statements more closely. Maybe they’re looking for a low-interest loan to ensure cash flow. Better yet- maybe they’ve debited that in exchange for stock. That $755 could be worth $5000 in a few months.
They did not pay me twice. I was actually checking my bank account to see if they paid me, and then I noticed I was at around $260. I freaked out and found that some weird company called Payoneer deducted $755. I checked out their website and found out that they are a prepaid credit card company, so I thought someone stole my bank info and got themselves a prepaid credit card. After some research, I discovered that Payoneer was also the company I signed up for direct deposit from MetaCafe. I then figured out what happened.
MetaCafe is a war mongering propaganda site, that allows videos that promote violence, videos where soldiers are telling the world to get *ucked and to *uck their *ick, and worse. They also allow porn that is degrading to women, yet they have banned a video that is an intellectual deconstruction of the heroic Red Barron myth of the “fighter” pilot, finding it “hateful and malicious”. If you want to see the video that MetaCafe, Bush, and Israel do not want you to see, go to http://www.patrickdodd.com and click on WAREAGLE VIDEO
I finally got to speak with someone on the phone at Payoneer about the situation, and he said there was a problem with a group of people having money withdrawn from their account instead of deposited. I’m not sure if this problem affected other MetaCafe Producer Rewards members or not though. He said it should be taken care of this weekend, so that means I probably won’t see the $755 for three more days. He said they will redeposit the $755 they withdrew as well as another $755 for the amount owed.
Overall though, I would say that MetaCafe has handled this exceptionally well. I called MetaCafe’s PR number, and the lady there was very helpful. Within an hour, a very nice lady named Allyson from MetaCafe called me, and I explained the situation to her. From what I can tell right now, this is entirely Payoneer’s fault. I would like MetaCafe to maybe use a different company in the future though. I was lucky I had more than $755 in my account.
And by the way, I disagree with MC Kean. MetaCafe the company doesn’t necessarily decide what videos are rejected. If you contact them directly, then they have some say, but really, the MetaCafe COMMUNITY is who decides. If you feel your videos were wrongly rejected, then I suggest getting more people with the same taste as you to sign up to MetaCafe. I mean, I get very disappointed when my crazy/bizarre videos get rejected. I think they are hilarious, but as I’ve learned, they aren’t for everyone.
MetaCafe’s site says this:
“Metacafe is one of the world’s largest online video broadcasters with a global audience of 20 million unique monthly viewers. We are a top 10 online entertainment destination for males 18 – 34 (Nielsen NetRatings)…”
So there you have it. If you want your videos to do well on MetaCafe, that’s the audience you need to make videos for. Except I bet their audience also contains a large portion of males and females who are even younger.
Videoronk the best
Thanks, Adrian. I think you were the one that put VideoRonk on our radar, and I agree it’s the best. Who’s behind it?
Ypimp