Video Search: Now more Flashy and Fresh than ever before
In our quest for video nirvana, we’ve performed a major update to
our Video Search index to
bring you even more video content, and increased reach for video
content worldwide. So now you’ll be able to find even more relevant
international results in your video searches.
In addition, we’ve branched out with the types of content that
video search covers, and tonight we’ve added support for searching
Flash animation! (Tip: if you want to limit your video search
results to just Flash animation, you can use
Search to target your search.) This means that now all your
favorite Flash sites like JibJab
and HomestarRunner (my
personal favorite) will now appear in your Video Search
results. Because Flash is interactive, you’re not just limited to
watching the content you find, you can also find interactive
games as well.
My favorite pick for videos that came out of testing this feature:
and his new Lappy 486 laptop computer. And yes, I do love this
job. ;)
Andy Volk
Product Manager, Yahoo! Video Search
Nice, I was able to to get old flash animations I had seen many years ago. Very convenient indeed.
This is a nice addition. However, how does Yahoo find video? I am the publisher of the educational site FloridaSprings.org which has been top ranked by Yahoo for the term florida spring for a couple of years. However, it can’t seem to see any video (rm,mov or swf)files on the site. Same with the site http://www.organtransplants.org which was a Yahoo Pick. It has high quality Flash presentations throughout.
It is really good to know that Yahoo! video search can support flash animation now. But I just doubt how many times users will really go to advanced search to select the format options (do you have any log data to figure that out?).
Maybe another option could be like what Amazon does, listing the searched results by categories, and then asking users to refine the results by selecting the categories. In this case, it could be listing the video formats with the searched results.
In addition, video search is a more iterative process comparing to simple text search, so it would be better that the system could provide better ways to help users to modiy their queries.
um, first time using this blog, what does the “Type Yahoo here” mean? don’t know what to type, I left it blank, and just couldn’t post the message.
On the off-chance that someone actually reads this – as a webmaster of a small site with just a few videos for a few friends, I really, really, _really_ dislike your video search. I gave my videos descriptive names, and now they’re turning up high in the index of dozens of searches – most unrelated – and people are wasting my bandwidth like crazy by watching these things.
I updated my robots.txt as soon as I noticed (roughly three weeks ago), but you still haven’t updated your index to reflect that. Have a care for the little people, would you??! Seriously, it seems to me that you could’ve anticipated problems like that and had some scheme in place to monitor robots.txt files for sites with a lot of new videos in the index.
hey this is really great show