VideoSurf.com Review
As most of you know I was working on a project this past year, however, I dropped the project over the summer due to lack of funding. Last Thursday, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal which talked about a new site called VideoSurf.com – it’s a video search engine. This was my idea! I couldn’t believe it! However, I wanted to take it a step further and include images and audio to create a complete multimedia search engine with social network capabilities so you could share, favorite, create playlists, and organize all your media content in one location.
VideoSurf is a video search engine which has indexed videos all over the web. The service allows you to find videos on topics you are searching for with extreme ease. It even has built in sharing functionality which I find a key part to being a social-type service. You can save specific searches to your home page, too – making them easily accessible. One feature which is currently disabled is the ability to find any particular point in the video and play it from that point (you can go through the video using thumbnail previews to find the specific point-in-time).
As for the search results the relevancy is relatively good, I only expect it to get better. However, I should note that since video files are often mis-tagged and do not contain meta-data such as web pages it can be extremely difficult to obtain relevant results. VideoSurf seems to have done a decent job here all things considered.
VideoSurf also will embed the video player within their website when you choose to play a video so you do not have to leave their site. Good move on their part in terms of keeping users on the site – looks good for advertising. In terms of advertising on the site it appears there are commercials after watching videos. I should note that the commercials may be from the video embed and may not have been through a VideoSurf advertising stream. If you have any information regarding their advertising or business model, feel free to leave a comment.
If you would to help me with my idea, feel free to contact me via email. Nonetheless, props to VideoSurf.com for launching – excellent service and I recommend you check it out.