The post about walls of video search made me think about my own attempts to search BBC News video with a Google custom search engine. Video searching is something that I've been interested in for some time and when Google started their custom search engine project
www.google.com/coop/cse
I put together a test CSE, My Name Is Video
www.mynameisvideo.com
that points at 70 different sites, including the BBC news URL
news.bbc.co.uk
(NB The CSE does not give video thumbnails as results, as Google Video does, because this functionality is not yet available in CSEs.)
The challenge in indexing BBC news video content as compared with video on many other sites is that the video seems hard to find. Whereas other sites typically group video like this
news.sky.com/skynews/video
BBC news apparently doesn't, so the best a CSE can do to cope is to search the BBC news URL with a wildcard like this:
news.bbc.co.uk/*video*
However, this work-around hardly works. If you search for an obvious keyword (Iraq, Bush, Blair) and click on the "News" link to select only the news sites, it easily obtains results from most of the other sites, but not the BBC news URL.
If there's one thing that the BBC could do to make third-party video searching easier to do, it could well be creating some accessible video URLs. Or have I missed them somewhere?
Cheers,
Colin
If anyone's interested in what can be done with Google CSEs generally, see also these:
Live Net Music - searching for live music from webcasters and radio stations (BBC radio is well represented!)
www.livenetmusic.com
Mad For Toys - searching UK online toy shops
www.madfortoys.com
At 15:17 30/11/2006, you wrote:
I've been using blinks 'wall of video' service for some time now to display specific sets of videos on various web sites.- Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
They provide the option to embedd flash based code into your html web pages
Take a look http://blinkx.com/wall?query=nhs
I had assumed that this kind of option - embedding of code would become available
The video search, early days I know, does not appear to work too well on the BBC site, when I tried to find this video:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/kent/videonation/videos/public_speaking.shtml
by searching for 'public speaking' it did not come out
A wall of public speaking videos on the newcastle public speakers web site http://www.newcastle-speakers.org.uk
would be great, I guess I'll just have to settle for http://blinkx.com/wall?query=toastmasters
