Yahoo Launches Video Search, New RSS Format

I talk to PR people on the phone a fair amount. And the tone of the people I talk to ranges all the way from "I'm only doing this until that Burger King gig comes through" to "Wait until I tell you this it is SO COOL."

Naturally I prefer to listen to the latter, especially when it really is cool. And while I can't describe it easily, I've been impressed with the Yahoo people I've talked to lately. They are so excited about what they're doing. And they're putting out some pretty cool stuff. And now it's video search. (Actually, Altavista-owned-by-Yahoo has had video search for a while now, and the results look very similar. But the Media RSS is a great idea.)

Yahoo's new video search is available at http://video.search.yahoo.com/ . It is in "test phase," which as I understand is even before beta, though I didn't have any problems searching it. You can search by simple keyword here, while an advanced search allows you to specify format (AVI, MPEG, Windows Media, Real, and Quicktime), size (small, medium, or large -- not very descriptive there, Yahoo), and whether they're over or under a minute. There are also a couple of regular Yahoo syntax here, like site:, and there's a content filter.

I searched for DDR. I got 387 results. Results showed a thumbnail of the video, the name of the file, screen size, length in seconds, and size in MB. Results are listed 20 to a page and it actually looks okay; not too crowded, good-sized thumbnails.

I asked the Yahoo person how they were finding video; if they were just crawling for it or if they were using discovery tools like Blogdigger's media RSS feeds (available at http://www.blogdigger.com/media/ ). She didn't know. But Yahoo is trying to make it easier for people to submit their video via a new proposed Media RSS module, described at http://tools.search.yahoo.com/mrss/mrss.html . If you've ever gone over a raw RSS feed, this'll look familiar. The proposed module supports thumbnails, credits, and even text transcripts. This is a good idea.

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