Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Truveo

Wandering on google news, I read an article (reuters) about a new video search engine called truveo. Pretends to be a step ahead google and yahoo video searches.

Let's try it.

I've entered the search I tried on google a few month ago when their video search was out: Jacques Chirac. The google video search returned a bunch of American talk shows about the war in Iraq and Chirac refusing to go, being a French coward. But absolutely no video featuring Chirac himself.
The problem is google is searching the subtitles, titles, and so on, but when speaking Chirac seldom pronounces his own name. This is the reason why, I suppose, Chirac interviews where nowhere to be seen.

So, here are today results on truveo, google and yahoo.
As you may see, truveo returns videos featuring Chirac, along with a title, date and details, informative and easy to read. The play button opens the source page, reuters video for my first try.
Google returns a documentary about the rainbow warrior. Not really up to date, which is not playable, even if the little play button is active. Clicking it leads to a page with photos every 30 seconds, with the caption "Video is currently not available. More information »". The More information link giving no more information. Well, this is still a google lab.
Yahoo returns a lot of videos, represented by a shot, a file name, size and length. File names are usually unreadable, no date, no title, nothing to assess if the video is of any use - only the shot on which you can see if it's Chirac talking or some news flash where is name is pronounced. Not really white noise, but not really better.

Then I guess this Truveo thing is interesting... If you need to search for videos.

See ya.

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