Video-browsing made easy
It’s Saturday night, and you just decided that you want to watch a particular movie. You have several options: You can rent the movie from a video rental store (a.k.a. the old fashioned method). You can download the movie off of iTunes or any of the various free file-sharing programs, or you can stream the movie onto your computer.
This last option is the hippest and newest way of watching TV and movies, but it comes with some obstacles. There’s the slowness of the buffering and terrible picture quality, not to mention the fact that you’re probably watching it on your tiny laptop or computer monitor, but most significantly, it’s hard to find what you want.
YouTube has an enormous amount of content, but its clips are limited to less than 10 minutes, and it certainly doesn’t have everything. Similar websites have similar problems. Their videos may be longer, but they may or may not have the video you’re looking for.
Video search engines have been created to combat this difficulty. The best of the bunch is Truveo, a subsidiary of AOL, which unveiled its new site last week after spending three years dormant.
Truveo offers several interesting features over its competitors. It assumes that users don’t know exactly what they want when they perform a search, and browsing through related content can help them figure it out. Users can organize their results by a variety of different criteria including top ranked, most viewed and most relevant.
The results are organized into three columns of five video thumbnails that give a description of the video when the cursor is moved over the thumbnail. This unique organization makes skimming the results much easier than browsing through the lists that competitors, Google and Yahoo, generate. A special bucket is also created in the top right of the results page if your search produced an abundance of results from the same webpage.
All in all, Truveo makes watching online content a little simpler. The creation of this search engine is yet another step towards making Internet content more practical to watch on the big screen.
