Not yet on TechCrunch: killer video search engine (ClipBlast)

Uncategorized 1 Minute

I’ve been looking for a great video search engine that includes all the videos that I’ve done. I’ve been to Dabble, Blinkx, YouTube, MeeVee, Truveo, and others. None have all my videos with the latest videos represented. Dabble is pretty close, actually, but Clipblast really blew them all away. Visit Clipblast and search on my last name, or on a topic you know I’ve covered like “Google Reader” to find the videos I’ve done of the Google Reader team. It’s really great.

I just learned about it from Gary Baker, Founder/CEO who is sitting next to me (I put a short video of him up on my Kyte channel, although that was a bit choppy because the Wifi sucks here).

Anyway, here’s the highlights.

1. Their engine has been spidering the video world for 3.5 years.
2. Three million professionally-done video clips with five million additional of user generated clips.
3. The current interface on Clipblast went live in April.

They also crawl engines like YouTube and MySpace and Daily Motion. Blip, Veoh, Brightcove, etc. are all crawled for their latest video.

Stuff they are strong on, according to Gary:

1. News video from local, national, international sources.
2. Video podcasting and video blogging
3. Newspapers that are putting video out, like New York Times and Los Angeles Times.
4. Commercials.

“Our ultimate goal is to get viewers and more views to the video.”

I’ll try it out more, but on a few minutes first look it really is great. What do you think?

Personally this is one I was happy to see before Mike Arrington and the TechCrunch crew. I have a feeling Mike will write about this pretty soon. šŸ™‚

Published by Robert Scoble

I help entrepreneurs build their technology business' story, help with getting ready for investors, with other launch plans, and many other strategic things that can help your new startup. Call to talk: +1-425-205-1921 (text first).

Published

73 thoughts on “Not yet on TechCrunch: killer video search engine (ClipBlast)”

  1. It completely bombed for me. I searched on “josh bancroft” and just bancroft, and of the 6 or 7 pages of results that I looked through, not a SINGLE ONE of the results had anything to do with me or my videos.

    I’ve been putting video out on the web for a couple of years now, and I’d expect at least one hit in the top few pages of results (there’s nothing that’s dominating the results, either – it looks kind of desperately random).

    *bzzzt*

    Next!

    Like

  2. It completely bombed for me. I searched on “josh bancroft” and just bancroft, and of the 6 or 7 pages of results that I looked through, not a SINGLE ONE of the results had anything to do with me or my videos.

    I’ve been putting video out on the web for a couple of years now, and I’d expect at least one hit in the top few pages of results (there’s nothing that’s dominating the results, either – it looks kind of desperately random).

    *bzzzt*

    Next!

    Like

  7. I’m actually working on a search project. What I was going to do is have our spider download the video, demux it, then do voice recognition on the audio to pull tags with FOSS voice recognition software on Linux. This seems very processor and bandwidth intensive though.

    How is clipblast pulling tags?
    Are they doing it from the html metadata for the clip or are they literally pulling the tags out of the video stream via voice recog.?

    Like

  9. I’m actually working on a search project. What I was going to do is have our spider download the video, demux it, then do voice recognition on the audio to pull tags with FOSS voice recognition software on Linux. This seems very processor and bandwidth intensive though.

    How is clipblast pulling tags?
    Are they doing it from the html metadata for the clip or are they literally pulling the tags out of the video stream via voice recog.?

    Like

  11. Interface sucks… let Gary Baker know that there is to much waisted space and not enough ajax. I want to be able to watch everyones videos right from that site. Let him know that I can help out with beta testing, suggestions, and such also.

    Like

  12. Interface sucks… let Gary Baker know that there is to much waisted space and not enough ajax. I want to be able to watch everyones videos right from that site. Let him know that I can help out with beta testing, suggestions, and such also.

    Like

  13. Did two searches. Both of them did not only not return anything I looked for, I can’t for the life of me figure out why it returned the utterly irrelevant “results” it did. Will never visit it again. Ever.

    I seriously hope any Techcrunch review doesn’t depend on how many results it returns for “Arrington”…

    Like

  14. Did two searches. Both of them did not only not return anything I looked for, I can’t for the life of me figure out why it returned the utterly irrelevant “results” it did. Will never visit it again. Ever.

    I seriously hope any Techcrunch review doesn’t depend on how many results it returns for “Arrington”…

    Like

  17. Pingback: Veoh TV: First Look

  18. OK, let’s see: 8 million video clips. Have anybody seen them all? Are they all good enough to be worth seeing? If not; why should I be able to find them via any video search engine? šŸ˜‰

    Like

  19. OK, let’s see: 8 million video clips. Have anybody seen them all? Are they all good enough to be worth seeing? If not; why should I be able to find them via any video search engine? šŸ˜‰

    Like

  20. “let Gary Baker know that there is to much waisted space and not enough ajax.”

    The AJAX is annoying, it makes your forward and back buttons in your browser malfunction. There is good AJAX and bad ajax, and this is bad ajax.

    Good ajax should not interfere with traditional browser navigation.

    Like

  21. “let Gary Baker know that there is to much waisted space and not enough ajax.”

    The AJAX is annoying, it makes your forward and back buttons in your browser malfunction. There is good AJAX and bad ajax, and this is bad ajax.

    Good ajax should not interfere with traditional browser navigation.

    Like

  24. This makes me think about something I had seen at Spring VON and wrote about on CenterNetworks in my recap (I think). I believe it had video search and then you could create your own schedule of things that were out there to watch, like you see on your cable channel. It was really cool.

    Like

  25. This makes me think about something I had seen at Spring VON and wrote about on CenterNetworks in my recap (I think). I believe it had video search and then you could create your own schedule of things that were out there to watch, like you see on your cable channel. It was really cool.

    Like

  28. I don’t like how Yahoo video search cheats the originating website.
    http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=1081073743&fr=yfp-t-501
    They just scrape the video urls and play them from the yahoo pages.
    The Real video scraper is going to do the same thing. What this does for the originating websites, especially since yahoo plays wmvs and mpegs directly without the host flash player is suck down all their bandwidth without ever giving them anything positive out of it.

    What’s going to happen really soon is that websites across the net are going to lock the video down to their flash player by means of a key/hash pair. That will pretty much put an end to Yahoo and Real.
    Otherwise both companies should be writing some bandwidth checks to the scraped website owners.

    Like

  29. I don’t like how Yahoo video search cheats the originating website.
    http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=1081073743&fr=yfp-t-501
    They just scrape the video urls and play them from the yahoo pages.
    The Real video scraper is going to do the same thing. What this does for the originating websites, especially since yahoo plays wmvs and mpegs directly without the host flash player is suck down all their bandwidth without ever giving them anything positive out of it.

    What’s going to happen really soon is that websites across the net are going to lock the video down to their flash player by means of a key/hash pair. That will pretty much put an end to Yahoo and Real.
    Otherwise both companies should be writing some bandwidth checks to the scraped website owners.

    Like

  30. I did a quick analysis of video search engines you might be interested in.
    http://www.sparkminute.com/?p=133

    Not only that, but I saw a demo from another video search engine, CastTV (www.casttv.com), at the Supernova conference in SF. Pretty cool search engine that divides up video searches by type. It’s in closed beta right now. I have a review of that and the 12 other companies that presented at the TechCrunch sponsored session.
    http://www.sparkminute.com/?p=191

    Like

  31. I did a quick analysis of video search engines you might be interested in.
    http://www.sparkminute.com/?p=133

    Not only that, but I saw a demo from another video search engine, CastTV (www.casttv.com), at the Supernova conference in SF. Pretty cool search engine that divides up video searches by type. It’s in closed beta right now. I have a review of that and the 12 other companies that presented at the TechCrunch sponsored session.
    http://www.sparkminute.com/?p=191

    Like

  34. It failed on first test I’ve made. I searched for Latvian thrash metal band Huskvarn – YouTube have three clips (two of them with content I wanted), ClipBlast has none. Also I don’t like, that I can’t link to ClipBlast search results.

    Like

  35. It failed on first test I’ve made. I searched for Latvian thrash metal band Huskvarn – YouTube have three clips (two of them with content I wanted), ClipBlast has none. Also I don’t like, that I can’t link to ClipBlast search results.

    Like

  36. Pingback: Clipblast: well that sucked at Sparkplug 9 >> bizhack

  39. Hey Scobleizer,

    I’m pretty sure this will come out soon http://www.wordnetworks.com .It’s in beta but will search video from various sources. Yahoo! is trying to do something similar with they news. Pretty cool if you ask me. I feel your pain with to many sources for video and not enough search power. Best of Luck!

    Doodles

    Like

  40. Hey Scobleizer,

    I’m pretty sure this will come out soon http://www.wordnetworks.com .It’s in beta but will search video from various sources. Yahoo! is trying to do something similar with they news. Pretty cool if you ask me. I feel your pain with to many sources for video and not enough search power. Best of Luck!

    Doodles

    Like

  41. @17,

    A lot of these sites simply want to present the store front of having the same depth and breadth as Google search to raise money. Whether the backend infrastructure or technology is there or not is not as important when showing it off to investors.
    I find that to be the case a lot with some of these new search engines. It’s horribly time consuming and expensive to really organize web content in a meaningful way. Interfaces however are rather cheaply done.

    Like

  42. @17,

    A lot of these sites simply want to present the store front of having the same depth and breadth as Google search to raise money. Whether the backend infrastructure or technology is there or not is not as important when showing it off to investors.
    I find that to be the case a lot with some of these new search engines. It’s horribly time consuming and expensive to really organize web content in a meaningful way. Interfaces however are rather cheaply done.

    Like

  43. I just thought I should let you know Mr. Scoble that ez-INFO has an article of you!

    here is the link.
    http://www.ezinfo.googlepages.com/home

    And I copy pasted it for you.

    Friday June 22, 2007

    Robert Scoble “BIG TIME BLOGGER worried about his videos?

    Here we a man reputable for his back ground as ā€œThe American Bloggerā€™ worried about his videos in his newest blog. Robert Scoble has turned out to be a middle aged boring blogger! Ez-Info has taken the initiative to inform the public of this manā€™s sadness in hopes to help the Mr. Scoble. Only to the possibly persuade him to talk about something more constructive in his blogs.

    Bankrupt on topics to write about, question remains. Will Robert Scoble continue to amuse his readers about his own success and public relations? Or will he continue to write and blog about topics that readers are really interested in? Manipulating his readers in his latest blog. Scoble simply worries about who has the largest collection of his videos. By doing so, he leads his audience to different web sites to praise his owe success. Selfish, degrading, and most of all a tactic used by the simplest bloggers on the net. We would think Scoble would know better than to blog such grade school content. With so much going on in our Worldā€™s arena, Scoble can only speak of his self work. You can read for yourself at his web site: http://scobleizer.com/

    By ez-INFO

    Like

  45. I just thought I should let you know Mr. Scoble that ez-INFO has an article of you!

    here is the link.
    http://www.ezinfo.googlepages.com/home

    And I copy pasted it for you.

    Friday June 22, 2007

    Robert Scoble “BIG TIME BLOGGER worried about his videos?

    Here we a man reputable for his back ground as ā€œThe American Bloggerā€™ worried about his videos in his newest blog. Robert Scoble has turned out to be a middle aged boring blogger! Ez-Info has taken the initiative to inform the public of this manā€™s sadness in hopes to help the Mr. Scoble. Only to the possibly persuade him to talk about something more constructive in his blogs.

    Bankrupt on topics to write about, question remains. Will Robert Scoble continue to amuse his readers about his own success and public relations? Or will he continue to write and blog about topics that readers are really interested in? Manipulating his readers in his latest blog. Scoble simply worries about who has the largest collection of his videos. By doing so, he leads his audience to different web sites to praise his owe success. Selfish, degrading, and most of all a tactic used by the simplest bloggers on the net. We would think Scoble would know better than to blog such grade school content. With so much going on in our Worldā€™s arena, Scoble can only speak of his self work. You can read for yourself at his web site: http://scobleizer.com/

    By ez-INFO

    Like

  49. @Pete,
    You can do that with ffmpeg and free GPL speech recognition:
    Such as http://freespeech.sourceforge.net
    As mentioned before it would be out of the grasp of anybody that doesn’t have a supercomputer because of the processing power involved in demux’ing all the video streams, then putting it through the speech to text to grep the keywords out.
    I bet Google did it though. They bought a jumbo jet. I bet they can afford a blue-gene.

    Like

  50. @Pete,
    You can do that with ffmpeg and free GPL speech recognition:
    Such as http://freespeech.sourceforge.net
    As mentioned before it would be out of the grasp of anybody that doesn’t have a supercomputer because of the processing power involved in demux’ing all the video streams, then putting it through the speech to text to grep the keywords out.
    I bet Google did it though. They bought a jumbo jet. I bet they can afford a blue-gene.

    Like

  53. blinkx uses voice recognition and works better than this. clipblast sucks if you try any search donot see how searching for just scoble is a test for a good search engine they probably just fixed that search first.

    Like

  54. blinkx uses voice recognition and works better than this. clipblast sucks if you try any search donot see how searching for just scoble is a test for a good search engine they probably just fixed that search first.

    Like

  55. Pingback: Dario Salvelli’s Blog » Blog Archive » Miss Second Life, Clipblast, VlogCamp e PubCamp
  56. Pingback: Video Search Engine: Clipblast » Digital Podcast

  57. Hi Robert,
    I just wanted to let you know that I did an analysis of Dabble verses Clipblast for the search: Scoble.

    Clipblast has 441 clips and Dabble has 198. I was puzzled as to why Dabble was short by 243 clips.

    I did some digging and found that Clipblast includes clips from Vodpod. Vodpod is a channels site (in other words they don’t host videos, but rather link and embed them). So most of the clips I found there were repeats where Vodpod users had bookmarked videos hosted at Podtech that both Clipblast and Dabble already have.

    We don’t post repeats, but instead aggregate the information that someone, somewhere else on the web, has bookmarked the video. We treat that as a gesture, instead of making tons of duplicates on our site.

    I also found that there were clips, if you go back a few pages in Clipblast the results, that have nothing around them at all that say “scoble” nor are they about Robert Scoble or any other scoble.

    For example, this video:
    http://www.metacafe.com/watch/272189/vin_diesel_script/
    is about Vin Diesel on the Daily Show.

    Or this clip about a balloon prank:
    http://www.metacafe.com/watch/271523/balloon_prank/

    Or this one about an aligator crying:
    http://www.metacafe.com/watch/272210/aligator_tears/

    So when I compared the actual clips, we actually had all the Scoble clips Clipblast does and are essentially the same in terms of breadth.

    In fact, I think Dabble is less confusing, because we don’t have all the duplicates of the same videos, at social bookmarking sites, listed as separate videos.

    thanks,
    mary
    founder of dabble.com

    Like

  58. Hi Robert,
    I just wanted to let you know that I did an analysis of Dabble verses Clipblast for the search: Scoble.

    Clipblast has 441 clips and Dabble has 198. I was puzzled as to why Dabble was short by 243 clips.

    I did some digging and found that Clipblast includes clips from Vodpod. Vodpod is a channels site (in other words they don’t host videos, but rather link and embed them). So most of the clips I found there were repeats where Vodpod users had bookmarked videos hosted at Podtech that both Clipblast and Dabble already have.

    We don’t post repeats, but instead aggregate the information that someone, somewhere else on the web, has bookmarked the video. We treat that as a gesture, instead of making tons of duplicates on our site.

    I also found that there were clips, if you go back a few pages in Clipblast the results, that have nothing around them at all that say “scoble” nor are they about Robert Scoble or any other scoble.

    For example, this video:
    http://www.metacafe.com/watch/272189/vin_diesel_script/
    is about Vin Diesel on the Daily Show.

    Or this clip about a balloon prank:
    http://www.metacafe.com/watch/271523/balloon_prank/

    Or this one about an aligator crying:
    http://www.metacafe.com/watch/272210/aligator_tears/

    So when I compared the actual clips, we actually had all the Scoble clips Clipblast does and are essentially the same in terms of breadth.

    In fact, I think Dabble is less confusing, because we don’t have all the duplicates of the same videos, at social bookmarking sites, listed as separate videos.

    thanks,
    mary
    founder of dabble.com

    Like

  59. Mary-

    Good analysis.

    ClipBlast is a web wide video search engine that indexes the world wide web for video. So naturally, Scoble is going to be found in multiple locations, on multiple hosts. To your point about “duplicates”, we do remove duplicates if found on the same host; a similar gesture as Dabble ā€“ we too are seeking to deliver a great user experience.

    Our index, however, honors scoble when found at multiple hosts. For example, ClipBlast’s index often has clips, often the same clips, at multiple hosts that are posted by scoble. Same for , cbs, nbc, amanda congden, wallstrip, warner music group or anyone for that matter. It’s their distribution strategy to post in multiple locations. Additionally, ClipBlast indexes platforms and sites like You Tube, MySpace, even VodPod, that enable users to share and point to video.

    While I agree that Dabble does a great job presenting video found at social bookmarking sites, ClipBlast is a web-wide video search engine that indexes video sources, platforms, sharing hosts and video across the web.

    Best

    Gary Baker
    Founder of ClipBlast

    Like

  60. Mary-

    Good analysis.

    ClipBlast is a web wide video search engine that indexes the world wide web for video. So naturally, Scoble is going to be found in multiple locations, on multiple hosts. To your point about “duplicates”, we do remove duplicates if found on the same host; a similar gesture as Dabble ā€“ we too are seeking to deliver a great user experience.

    Our index, however, honors scoble when found at multiple hosts. For example, ClipBlast’s index often has clips, often the same clips, at multiple hosts that are posted by scoble. Same for , cbs, nbc, amanda congden, wallstrip, warner music group or anyone for that matter. It’s their distribution strategy to post in multiple locations. Additionally, ClipBlast indexes platforms and sites like You Tube, MySpace, even VodPod, that enable users to share and point to video.

    While I agree that Dabble does a great job presenting video found at social bookmarking sites, ClipBlast is a web-wide video search engine that indexes video sources, platforms, sharing hosts and video across the web.

    Best

    Gary Baker
    Founder of ClipBlast

    Like

  63. check this VeZoom video search engine. I have found that VeZoom, returns the most relevant results.

    Like

  64. check this VeZoom video search engine. I have found that VeZoom, returns the most relevant results.

    Like

  67. Hi all,
    I’m a developer of vizhole.com – video search website.. Please review the vizhole search engine if interested…
    &&&
    Please if you know or expect that, could you tell me
    how many unique visitors per day popular video search engine sites such as dabble, blinkx, truveo seem to have?
    I’ve seen their Alexa rankings but I still don’t know how to read the daily reach standard (0.01~0.05) there..

    Like

  68. Hi all,
    I’m a developer of vizhole.com – video search website.. Please review the vizhole search engine if interested…
    &&&
    Please if you know or expect that, could you tell me
    how many unique visitors per day popular video search engine sites such as dabble, blinkx, truveo seem to have?
    I’ve seen their Alexa rankings but I still don’t know how to read the daily reach standard (0.01~0.05) there..

    Like

  73. Pingback: » ClipBlast Distribute and Track Video Widgets with the Help of Clearspring » Social Networking Blog - SociableBlog.com

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