Searching for videos with VideoSurf

VideoSurf is a video search engine (still in beta format) . This is a new search engine that should be useful when trying to find video footage.

There is a good post on OmniVideo blog entitled Video search, are we there yet? that discusses how it works. Basically VideoSurf uses visual scanning technology to index videos. Analyzing a video is an incredibly complex problem. VideoSurf does the heavy work for web viewers with algorithms that identify people and backgrounds in videos and then converts them into thumbnail frames that summarize sections of the video. Visual computer scanning means search results will be more relevant than relying on tagging video clips with descriptions and analyzing the audio portion of clips to make videos searchable through text (as does Blinkx and Truveo).

It is a multi search video engine, easy to use and information comes from a wide variety of sources. Search results can be refined by content type, category (news, TV, funny, Vlogs) or source. You can choose to show only faces and can also sort by relevance and date added. The results show a large thumbshot together with smaller thumbnails at various points through the video.

Doing a search on G20, VideoSurf found 231 videos from a full search of over 20 different sources.

I like the idea of being able to find video footage to add to discussions on current issues, be it for English politics, religion and ethics, to name a few.

According to the site itself: [VideoSurf is a] new kind of video search engine that’s creating a better way for you to search, discover and watch online videos. Using patent-pending computer vision algorithms that can actually see the video’s content, VideoSurf serves up more relevant results for your queries and offers a new, visual way for you to interact with the video set returned. You can refine your results based on the people who actually appear in the videos and pinpoint the specific moments you’re interested in watching or sharing with your friends.

more about “Searching with VideoSurf “, posted with vodpod