The VideoSurf folks dropped by our office today to give us a quick tour of the site and announce that the free video search engine is opening up today to all users, no registration required.
VideoSurf is similar to other video search services in that it aggregates results from lots of the major video sites on the Web, but its big trick is using facial recognition to link your search results together.
For instance, search on "80s music" and you'll get a list of video results. Across the top, you'll see a row of faces that appear in the different videos, in this case Michael Jackson, Bono, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, and so on. Click on Bono's thumb and the results will re-sort themselves to give you only Bono clips from the 80s.
It's a compelling way of doing advanced searches for videos across mutiple sources. Once you've selected a video to watch, VideoSurf offers a timeline of thumbnails so you can search within the clip for the exact scene you want to watch, or you can choose a face and watch only the scenes which include that particular face.
Of course, meta text initially needs to be associated to a face for the system to work, and that takes time. A search on "Lance Ulanoff" shows his clips from various news programs, but in this case VideoSurf is presumably only searching the meta data of the videos for Lance's name
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment