There’s always been a tension in search between organizing information for users and getting out of the way so they can get to that information as quickly as possible. With text links, getting people to the correct page as fast as possible usually produces the best experience. But when it comes to video, which is a self-contained form of information, a better search experience is to be able to play the video right in results. Otherwise, in addition to clicking back and forth until you find the video you want, you are also adding the delay of playing the video.
Video search sites like Blinkx and Google Video (yes, that is still around) figured this out ages ago. And Bing’s video search lets you play a video simply by hovering over the thumbnail, or you can click to enlarge for a more satisfying viewing experience.
Even Yahoo is getting with the program. Today it spruced up inline viewing in video search, something which it’s had for a year, but only with a small video player. Now for most videos, you can click play, and it opens up a large rectangle with a slightly larger player inside. It will also sometimes offer thumbnails of related videos inside that rectangle so that you can continue exploring and drilling down on a video-by-video basis.
None of this going to change the fact that 90 percent of you will continue to search on YouTube when you are looking for a video on the Web.
Yahoo has been getting too slow to respond and definitely too distracted and weakened to innovate. It is only a matter of time before their final and complete acquisition. Once they were great, now only a pale copy.
Still has a way to go to catch up to the Australian search engine Yauba in search results. For example, this is what you get for Inglourious Basterds
http://au.yauba...&target=all
This is why Aussie technology rules …
+1
Nice. I like Yauba a lot … although I think you are mistaken about Yauba being from Australia.
They seem to be based in England and India at least from their about page and from their intro video
http://www.yout...h?v=seaUn_zjPl8
I tried your yauba and searched for the word “parasite” but was sorely disappointed with the results. Compared to Bing (which is arguably not the best search engine) it failed to find much in the way of useful results.
@WTFreak: you can’t blame him for assuming it is Aussie tech because it’s front page declares that it is “Australia’s First Privacy Safe, Real-Time Search Engine” and their databases appear to be filled with Australian sites – which may explain the poor results I got
Yahoo deserves the functionality of playing videos years back. It’s not a new feature. Maybe Yahoo revamped video functionality with improved features after the deal with Bing. Its good that Yahoo is expanding, but it has to quicken its innovations to achieve its targets.
I would have to agree with milos! They are still going in circels.
AFAIK Yahoo has embedded videos from Youtube for quite a while now, and they were playable inline.
I can’t believe it took Yahoo this long. I think the best implementation of this is still probably Yauba or Bing, however
http://au.yauba...&target=all
Sweet … can’t ask for more than that …
Shhh … the first rule of Yauba is that you NEVER talk about Yauba
Why not?
AFAIK, Bing doesn’t let you play the whole video from search results, it gives a preview video of more or less 15 seconds.
Unfortunate for all those porn addicts in the office.
I think Yahoo just really needs to walk away from the search game
yahoo isn’t going anywhere.
Why?
Cool, we can watch porn without going to the spyware/popup pages.
Yea.
It being around 1 year or may be more than that .. yahoo was providing this functionality. Thats why i loved Yahoo video search soon i found out that Microsoft live search was also giving this feature on mouse hover.
Please check your source. They have modified the way it shows. Now a div with full width of the page and they have also added some related video section. but they had playable videos for ages.
yes, that’s right, it was smaller before. I’ve update the post.
Erick, I appreciate your articles but do you really have to add back-handed complements and snarky remarks when talking about Yahoo.
Sure, Yahoo hasn’t been doing well and is an easy target for puns. Guess what? Success for any startup or established company is hard.
It certainly is easy to sit back and just be a critic. It’s a lot harder to do great work and be successful.
Agreed.
Hasn’t Yahoo been doing this for a while now?
WTF?! Yahoo! have been supporting inline video playing for well over a year now. The only change seems to be the format of the result set.
Geez the reporting on this site sucks!
Erick, Yahoo! Search has had playable videos embedded in search results for almost two years. You even reported on the feature when it was launched: http://www.tech...st-got-smarter/
Agreed with other commenters — Yahoo! Search has provided the ability to view videos directly from the search results page at least since October 3rd, 2007. I know this, because that’s when I wrote a blog post about it: http://ycoolthi...deo-even-faster (not trying to spam, just providing a timestamp). Obvious disclaimer — I work for Yahoo!.
Yahoo! has been supporting this functionality since 2007. More telling, TechCrunch reported on it back in 2007. Talk about forgetting your own history
Pretty sure this has been around for a long time on Yahoo! Search.
Welcome to the party, TechCrunch. Use Yahoo much? Apparently not!
I created a website a while back that does the same for Twitter real-time search – plays videos embedded in tweets, plays music embedded in tweets, shows URL info if one is embedded in tweets, as well as directly displaying any images from twitpic or moby picture directly in the Tweet… check it out at http://tweetibird.com – here’s a video example – http://tweetibi...com/video/Jay-Z