Posts Tagged ‘Video Search’

Sketch of Video Search Results Page: Crepe Search

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

Video Search Results Page for Cooking Better Crepes
dscn20621This post is about searching within videos, not searching FOR videos.
This past week the wife was gone and the kids wanted me to learn to make crepes. I did and we had crepes 4 days in a row. Rotating through breakfast, lunch and dinner. I was very interested in finding different crepe recipes and figuring out different techniques to improve my skill.

When I started to search for different recipes I found many that were in video format.
MANY.
I watched them and tried to take note of how the chefs’ did things differently. Did they hold the pan above the stove when pouring or pour while the pan was on the heat? In what shape did they pour the batter – in one glop, in a circle. Where did they slide the crepe when it was filled with good stuff – to the center or side of the pan. These and many more questions intreged me.

The cuurent sesrch results and video players didn’t fit my need. What I really wanted were results that were both video and text. Or video that cut right to clip that showed the part I was interested in. OR even that I could play two or three videos next to each other and see side-by-side comparisons.

Video search right now seems to be dominated by an entertainment mentality. Even in the “how-to” space I feel each video is allowed to live on it’s own, to be judged on it’s own like a piece of artwork. There isn’t microcontent or a smaller level of granularity. What about using video (or better videos) to BUILD knowledge or expertise on something. I want the list of 100 videos to be showed in a matrix that I can split as I see fit. Perhaps even run some cross-tabs on. I would work in principle like the face recognition in iPhoto – you’d just have to identify one or two cases for it to use.
This is just a fun exploration of a video search that would help me come up with better crepes. I like the UI and how it allows me to compare information across the the different video cooking demos. I also like the ability of it to let me know that there is something new in a certain demo and that I might want to take a closer look, thought in terms of usability I don’t know how I would allow multiple videos to play at same time while keeping some of this result page information.