ResearchBuzz

I don’t mean to sound jaded — I’m just amazed at how many of these sites have popped up in the last few months. WonderHowTo, available at http://www.wonderhowto.com/ has already indexed over 90,000 video clips, so at least they’re starting with a pretty good collection.

And I must say, the front page grabbed me with several odd clips. The columns on the front page include the latest additions, hottest videos, and the hidden gems. I spotted “How To Make double cheddar horseradish mashed potatoes”, “How To Care for a child with autism”, and “How To Mod a slim PS2″.

It doesn’t appear that WonderHowTo.com hosts any videos. Instead when you click on a screenshot or title, you get a detail page that provides details on the video, rankings (A to F), a space for comments (I didn’t see any videos with comments) and related videos. Most importantly, you also get a link to the video on an external site (I saw YouTube, BrightCove, 5min.com, FAA.gov, and a lot more.)

If you don’t care to look at the hot/recent/hidden stuff on the front page, you also have the option of browsing an incredibly-detailed category index (DO NOT MISS the *5* macrame videos!) or searching by keyword. Searching for cheese found 340 videos, including instructions on selecting cheese for a platter, making raw vegan cheese from nuts, and several variations on mac n’ cheese.

Playing with this site, I found a number of nice design touches, including tracking of your recent searches, recent community searches, and popular community searches (as you imagine not all of these are family-friendly.) I was surprised that there didn’t appear to be RSS feeds available for search results.

I’m afraid I don’t get the monkey meme — perhaps I’m too old. I’m not too old, however, to appreciate another video instruction site like MonkeySee (http://www.monkeysee.com/ .)

MonkeySee has launched with a lot of instructional videos, adding both user-submitted videos and videos from professionals. The front page covers a lot of bases, from how to solve a Rubik’s Cube to how to buy a diamond to how to do trick shots in pool. Of course there’s the usual crop of “how to” stuff that doesn’t quite fit but looks useful anyway — in this case for fire safety and “flair bartending” (including a nifty and loud way to open a beer. Wonder if this would work for root beer.)

You can browse videos in several ways, including by topic, by most-viewed, highest-rated, and most recently added. You can also do a keyword search. (I did a search for fly and got no result count but seven pages of results, the first of which were associated with ski waxing.)

The interesting thing about MonkeySee is that how-to concepts are gotten across with a series of videos instead of just one. How to get out of a speeding ticket, for example, includes fifteen videos that walks through several steps of what to do when getting pulled over, before going to court, etc.

Other than having fifteen videos listed on a page, the video pages look very YouTubish, with information about the submitter/expert on the right, icons to embed/link to the video via several social networks, and spaces for comments. There’s a link for downloading video but apparently that feature hasn’t been activated yet.

I can’t find an RSS feed for the latest videos, and the latest videos are a little hard to navigate anyway since series of videos are being added instead of one at a time, but there was some very interesting content here. Worth a look.

Zuula is a metasearch tool that I quite like. It’s available at http://www.zuula.com/. I noticed last week that there are a few new search options.

First Zuula has a new toolbar available. I’m not really into that, but if you are and want more details you can get ‘em at http://www.zuula.com/help/ZuulaToolbar.html. Zuula has also helpfully made code available if you want to put a Zuula search form on your own Web page.

Now for the improvements on the site itself. The blog search engine has a new search engine available; BlogDimension stood up pretty well to a sample test (“strawberry shortcake”) though now I’ve found several new cooking blogs to read AND I’m hungry.

There’s also a whole new search type on Zuula; video search now offers searching of video sites, including Google Video, YouTube, iFilm, MetaCafe, and DailyMotion. Zuula’s tabbed metasearch now includes Web Search, Images, Video, News, Blog Search, and Jobs.