Hulu Captions Search a Preview of General Video Search to Come?
Filed under: Search Engines, Social Media Marketing
Hulu has a new captions search feature available via Hulu Labs. The feature allows Hulu users to search the captions of videos across hundreds of different shows. Show and video pages now have a “Captions” tab, and search can be found there.
“Recently I watched an episode of House, and they made a funny joke about the resemblance between Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps) and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment of within the episode,” says Hulu’s Eugene Wei. “With the new caption search, I just type in ‘mike tomlin’, and voila.”
Users can hover their cursors over images to get quick previews. It will show a short segment of a video centered around the search term. This will play in the thumbnail.
This is a good example of how video search is going to be improving significantly. YouTube, the world’s most popular video site (and 2nd largest search engine) recently announced that it would be including automatic captions on videos. This makes videos much more searchable as far as dialogue goes.
“One bonus that comes with caption search is what we’re calling the heat map. This is a visual graph of the user interest throughout the span of a video and is available on any captioned video that has accumulated enough user views,” says Wei. “It appears at the top of the captions tab for those videos. We analyze a variety of viewer behaviors to generate the heat map.”
The heat map can be used as a navigation tool, and to find popular segments of video. Wei talks a bit more about the heat map aspect here.
Hulu’s Caption search is still just a beta feature, so it is subject to imperfections. The site is openly encouraging feedback via feedback@hulu.com.
Related Articles:
> YouTube Launching Automatic Video Captions
> Hulu Adds New Options to the Queue
> Hulu Makes More Search Improvements
Duplicate Content Owners Catch a New Break from Google
Google announced that it now offering cross-domain support of the rel=”canonical” link element. If you are unfamiliar with this link element, Google’s Matt Cutts discussed it with us here. Basically, it’s a way to avoid duplicate content issues, but until now, you couldn’t use it across domains.
“For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to [have] duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects,” says John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst with Google Zürich.
Do you have legitimate reasons for having duplicate content? Tell us about them.
“There are situations where it’s not easily possible to set up redirects,” he says. “This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel=’canonical’ link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel=’canonical’ link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible.”
Mueller gives the following ways of handling cross-domain content duplication:
- Choose your preferred domain
- Reduce in-site duplication
- Enable crawling and use 301 (permanent) redirects where possible
- Use the cross-domain rel=”canonical” link element
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable gives three reasons why the addition of cross-domain support for the rel=”canonical” link element is really important:
1. Some hosts don’t allow webmasters to deploy 301 redirects
2. Some site owners aren’t technical enough to implement a 301 redirect
3. In some cases, webmasters do not want to redirect users but rather only search engines (i.e. pagination, weird filtering, tracking parameters added to URLs, etc).
To use the link element, pages don’t have to be identical, but they should be similar. According to Google, slight differences are fine. You should not point point rel=”canonical” to the home page of the preferred site. Google says this can result in problems, and that a mapping from an old URL to a new URL for each URL on the old site is the best way to go.
You should not use a nonindex robots meta tag on pages with a rel=”canonical” link element because those pages would not be equivalent with regards to indexing, Google says. One would be allowed while the other would be blocked. Google also says it’s important that these pages aren’t disallowed from crawling through a robots.txt file, because search engine crawlers won’t be able to discover the rel=”canonical” link element.
Will you find cross-domain support of the rel=”canonical” link element useful? Comment here.
Related Articles:
> Duplicate Content on Google, Bing & Yahoo
> Google Busts the Duplicate Content Myth
> Internationalizing Without Duplicate Content Worries
Google (Again) At Center Of Tax Avoidance Accusations
Although it’s hard to predict the split between thank you notes and hate mail, Google’s accountants may be receiving a lot of letters over the next few days. It looks like Google managed to avoid paying about $725 million in taxes in the UK last year.
Back in April, The Sunday Times determined that Google saved itself $160 million in 2007 thanks to its practice of channeling revenues through Ireland instead of Britain. More than a few people protested the shuffle, arguing that Google wasn’t playing fair.
Now, the objections have gotten more strenuous. Vince Cable, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, told Robert Watts, “Avoidance like this is hard to stomach at the best of times. But when the country is in recession and everyone is feeling the pain, it really sticks in the throat – it means higher taxes for the rest of us.”
Cable then continued, “Google’s reputation will be severely damaged if it continues to behave in this way. It is ducking its social responsibility.”
Google’s shareholders are sure to appreciate these maneuvers, however, and everyone agrees that the company’s actions aren’t in any way illegal.
FTC Warns Of Online Free Trial Scams
The Federal Trade Commission has joined an effort to warn consumers about deceptive online marketing related to free trial offers that require people to cancel or opt-out of a recurring charge for future products or services.
The Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, David C. Vladeck, along with officials from Visa and the Better Business Bureau (BBB) are cautioning consumers about the free trial feature, known as a “negative option.” In a negative option feature, a company takes a consumer’s failure to cancel a free trial offer as permission to begin charging for the service.
The FTC says many businesses use this billing process appropriately, others pre-check consent boxes, bury details of the offers in fine print, terms and conditions, and make cancellations or returns difficult, landing people in a cycle of recurring charges for products and services they do not want.
“Free trial marketing can be convenient for consumers-if the terms are clearly spelled out beforehand,” Vladeck said. “Legitimate marketers don’t hide critical information about costs or cancellation policies to get their customers to agree to future charges.”
The FTC, Visa and the BBB offer the following tips to online shoppers on how to spot misleading free trial offers and how to deal with unauthorized charges:
- Take time to read and understand all terms and conditions, so a free trial doesn’t turn into a costly purchase you didn’t intend to make.
- Pay particular attention to any pre-checked boxes before you submit your payment card information for an order. Failing to un-check the boxes may bind you to terms and conditions you don’t want.
- Review credit card statements when you get them for any unauthorized charges, and notify the card issuer promptly of any unusual activity or unauthorized charges.
- Try to resolve the situation with the merchant. If you’re unsuccessful, contact the card issuer immediately to dispute the charge.
Consumers who think they have been victims of deceptive marketing and who have not been able to resolve the issue with the merchant should call their credit card company to dispute the charge. Consumers can also file a complaint with the FTC or their local BBB.
Related Articles:
> Google Cracks Down On “Google Money” Scammers
>FTC Sues Intel, Intel Says “Misguided”
> FDA Targets Websites Over Drug Sales
Just How Real-Time is Google’s Real-Time Search?
As you have no doubt heard by now, actress Brittany Murphy tragically passed away over the weekend. As saddening as that news was for many, people wanted information about it. As with any other celebrity death or big news event, people scrambled to find updates. This need for fresh info is really where real-time search has its greatest potential.
Google has only recently begun showing “real-time” results in its search results, pulling tweets from Twitter, updates from Facebook fan pages, blogs, news, outlets, etc. The idea behind Google showing such results, is that people can find the freshest info possible that relates to their query.
Have you found Google’s real-time search results useful for finding fresh information? Discuss here.
Real-time search is generally thought of as providing results as they are posted online. In its truest sense, that’s what it is, but Google’s so-called real-time search may not be as real-time as initially thought. It’s close, but not quite there.
Search industry expert Danny Sullivan followed Google’s real-time search coverage of Murphy’s death closely. He found that Google’s real-time results were “wildly out of sync” with the results on Twitter itself. He noted that while Google’s most recent result would say that it was 2 minutes old, Twitter would have 700 more results rolling in.
“In fact, I found that Google’s real time results often simply stopped scrolling for minutes at a time,” says Sullivan. “To get them to restart, I’d have to reload the page.”
But is Google’s “real-time” results being slightly behind real-time necessarily a bad thing? As Sullivan says, a lot of this no doubt has to do with Google’s own filtering, and he didn’t notice any spam getting through. There is a pretty good chance that those 700 Twitter results contained plenty of spam and/or redundancies (although Sullivan did find a few redundancies in Google’s results too).
Google’s Matt Cutts commented on Sullivan’s report, weighing in on the search engine’s handling of alleged real-time results. According to him, the news of Murphy’s death was broken at 1:37 PM, and first tweeted about at 1:40 PM. He says Google’s real-time results began two and a half minutes later, noting tht this was “entirely algorithmic.”
“I think Danny makes fair points about better tools being needed to search the real-time stream and to highlight the important links/stories,” says Cutts. “At the same time, the real-time stream worked as intended to highlight a breaking story and to show the flavor of how people are reacting to the event. The rest of the search results are also there to help give important news and context. And even the Google real-time results did a fair job of highlighting news articles, not just tweets.”
That said, Cutts does acknowledge that Google can do better, but thinks they’re doing a pretty good job for a first-time test of real-time search. Would you agree with him? Share your thoughts here.
Related Articles:
> Tips for Getting Found in Real-Time Searches
> Google Makes a Second Real-Time Search Announcement
> Yahoo Rolling Out Something Kind of Like Real-Time Search