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Search Engine for Online Video and Audio

Let’s just keep riding that multimedia indexing bandwagon, shall we? The next stop is Snipp.TV ( http://www.snipp.tv/search ), which allows you to search audio and media files for keywords. Snipp.TV describes what it is doing as “keyword spotting,” so I’m not sure if entire transcriptions of clips are being generated and searched. I did have luck searching for names and less-common words which might not make good topics.

The search engine at Snipp is regular keyword (the search box does provide suggestions as you type, but it’s a little slow). I started with Wii Fit. I got 5 results. There’s a media player on the left and search results on the right. Search results include several screenshots, source and length, and a small summary. There’s also a list of topics covered by that clip. Check out the two icons with each search results. The icon that looks like a pair of glasses will show you a list of topics covered by that clip. You can click on any of the topics listed and explore related sets of keywords that way.) The other icon lets you add your search results to a playlist. Very nice. I wasn’t sure that Snipp.tv was indexing EVERYTHING in a clip, so I did a search for Tsuboi, which is the last name of a reporter at CNET. I got about 27 results. (At the same time I got only 5 results on a search for “Wii Fit”. Huh?)

I’m going to have do a lot more playing with this in order to understand how best to work the keywords — I’m really surprised “Tsuboi” did better than “Wii Fit”. (Wii got 34 results, so maybe I’m getting too specific in my searching.) I love the way the playlist option is laid out, and I like the topic lists. If the suggested searches were a little faster I’d really like those too.

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