Google and Bing Consider a New Search Engine Just for Children
Have you ever stood by a child struggling to get a search going on Google, and itched to tell him what obvious search keywords he was missing, or how he needed to understand the psychology of search differently? Most adults don’t rush to help the children out right away; the only way to learn the mind of a search engine, to learn the way it uses words, is through repeated trial and error. As far as making search engines child-friendly goes, most search engines usually go no farther than to protect them from unsavory content. It may be time for the major search engines to think of the child constituency differently. Children are using the Internet for all kinds of learning, and homework; and they need search engines to be tailored to their level of maturity. The search engines are only just beginning to grasp this; and their programmers are studying usability by children.The problem is, search engines were basically always designed for the adult mind; while they could have seen it coming, the engineers just always assumed from the start that the Internet was for serious pursuits such as research, and that frame of mind has persisted. Children for instance, do not read as effortlessly as adults do. Search engines aimed at children could conceivably make better use of pictures or videos. Children could even use an automated help system with pre-recorded content when they come up against a wall. Google is today considering designing a search engine just for children; and they have a deeper reason to do this then just being nice. They consider it possible that children would just have the same problems that adults have, only amplified. By studying the way children work on Google, adult weaknesses could become easier to notice. Studying children can provide deeper insights into the exact ways in which adults go wrong.
Google has had a Related Searches feature for about two years now. Looking up a phrase like ‘the jungle’on Google could give a child the regular results, but also possible related suggestions, like videos on YouTube, information on the various national parks in the US, and some information about species extinction in the Amazon. Children don’t type really well, and tend to look closely at the keyboard as they go along. The part of the screen closest to the keyboard, at the bottom, is therefore important screen real estate for the search engines. Bing has found a special niche with children. The search engine has especially leaned towards images far more than the others, and it attracts children.
Not to be outdone, Google has had the Wonder Wheel feature turned on for a few months now. You get to it when you press on ‘Show Options’ when you get your search results. A wheel pops up, with spokes pointing you in different desired directions. Search engines don’t understand what exactly you’re asking; they find it hard enough as it is to understand what words you want. Children seem to want to use natural language when dealing with searches. And search engines want to be able to make some sense of natural language questions. The most promising development here so far has to be the Voice Search feature available on the iPhone and Android smartphone operating system. Of course those were developed with business users in mind;children would think it was pretty cool too.
YouTube is a Big Fish in the Internet Pond; but in the Real World, Maybe not so Much
Most video serving websites will look at YouTube with awe and feel hopelessly dwarfed; but could there be anything that actually dwarfs YouTube? As it would happen, YouTube, a site that has a guaranteed lock on about 15 minutes of its viewers’ time every day on average, feels envious of the kind of command the regular boob tube has on people ‘s time that they would not mind spending hours in front of it. The way a small niche YouTube clone site looks at enviously at YouTube’s 15 minute sand thinks “Now if only I could get two of those minutes, what a difference it would make”, YouTube salivates for a couple of hours stolen from television.It’s not that YouTube lacks the content; they once said that viewers pumped a couple of dozen hours of video every minute into YouTube’s servers. They have the content; they only need a way to help viewers find the things they like, and watch them. It could take YouTube through the the roof. And this barely profitable company could really begin to pull in advertising.
What is the biggest search engine on earth after Google? Well, it’s YouTube search, of course. And YouTube searches are much more difficult for search algorithms to decipher, because there is actually nothing in the videos that actually has any keywords that the algorithm needs. No search engine actually understands the images in a video; they depend entirely on the tags submitted by the uploader. They need all-new approaches for YouTube search; kind of like the data mining that eBay or Amazon use, to give you recommendations based on what you already are known to like. Maybe they need to announce a search design prize like Netflix did, to improve recommendations.
And of course there is negative marking; if their recommendations are often wrong, they could turn visitors off.YouTube and Google figure that they need personal information for this; much, much more than what they have already. They’ll need to spy on your e-mail, look at what you do on Facebook, look at what your friends do on Facebook, before they can get something right.
They figure that perhaps users need to be given a more TV-like experience if they are to compete with it. Maybe if they could get their viewers to relax a little, and have instant gratification like with TV, they could get somewhere. If YouTube could just move away from having users used search to discover videos; if users could just flip through stacks of videos with the minimal buffering wait period, then YouTube will finally have it made.
Crowdsourcing – Outsourcing to the Cloud
Dubai was reported to be in financial trouble recently; Iceland is practically in hock, and Greece is waiting in line. In all the countries around the world that have fallen to the financial meltdown, getting a regular job at a factory or at a newspaper office, or selling investments, is the dream that is best abandoned at this point. But people in poor countries still can get enough to get by on, if they have a computer connection at home, and don’t mind doing a little online grunt work. It goes by a more printable name, called Crowdsourcing. This is where you take company tasks that you would normally delegate to some tread- upon factotum at your office, and spread the cheer among a hundred unseen factotum across the world. And you would spend pennies on them for an hour of their time.Amazon.com ‘s Mechanical Turk and Live Work websites have been picking up freelance efforts in this way from all around the world for years now. But in the years it’s been around, it’s only lived on the fringes of the outsourcing business. For the last three years, the Californian start up CrowdFlower has really got into this business, to try to make it a regular part of the average major corporation’s outsourcing plan. CrowdFlower allows businesses to use Mechanical Turk and Live Work and allows them to verify the credentials of the online workers they list too;, and it will keep an eye on quality control in addition, in a way that ordinary freelance classifieds like Amazon’s ventures could never do.
This is quite a fascinating way in which to tap human resources. And it is reminiscent of the way cloud computing works too – with the cloud, you are supposed to not actually have any computing resources yourself; nor are you supposed to have resources earmarked for you at a remote location. You’re just supposed to trust that in all the pooled resources, somewhere, will be something for you at the right time. And it still always turns out to work exactly as if you had your own dedicated arrangements. Crowd Flower allows you to switch on or off an entire global army of qualified labor, and leave it to the managing companies to pick up the loose ends. You could hire your own full-time gopher to do your work, and micromanage and pay that person all the time, or you could farm the work out to a dozen people for a fraction of the pay. You get your results in a fraction of the time too. It isn’t just the small Internet businesses trying to make a quick buck that step into crowd sourcing either. Corporations like Microsoft and Oracle have discovered this as a way of simplifying their little jobs too.
At the opposite end of the crowd sourcing spectrum is the way companies try to harness creativity in the crowd. The French company Eyeka does marketing, or consumer engagement, as it is called, in this way. Companies and brands contact Eyeka to have innovative viral advertising campaigns dreamt up for them. Eyeka’s thousands of members pick up assignments they like and create videos or pictures for the project. If they get picked, they get the job. If it happens to be any good, some young kid out there who’s been putting out videos on his personal YouTube clone for free, suddenly gets a couple of hundred thousand dollars for his trouble. From pennies an hour to hundreds of thousands of dollars, crowdsourcing seems to be finding its niche.
How many Viewers do Video Streaming YouTube Clone Sites actually Get?
YouTube is the number one video streaming site out there; and Nielsen estimates that they served 6 billion videos in December. And Hulu at number two, served about a tenth that number. But what if you tried a different polling firm, one like comScore? This company believes that Hulu is at the number two position too; but according to them, Hulu served almost a billion videos last month. Anyone with a little YouTube clone site will be humbled by every number mentioned here; but it makes you wonder still; do these numbers make any sense if they can be so far apart when measured by two different polltakers?Hulu has always been protesting against the way these polls are taken. It isn’t clear whether one Hulu video that runs for an hour, should count just the same as a YouTube video that runs for just three minutes. After all, YouTube mainly streams short files that are user-uploaded, while Hulu only does regular broadcast content and movies – things that last much, much longer. Should only the main program material be counted, or should streaming advertisements count too? What about videos that are watched off-site, on an embedded player elsewhere? Poorly defined standards of measurements like this, can often cause these discrepancies.
Essentially, these numbers are so impressive when reported by comScore, because they include every streamed advertisement run with a program. Nielsen does not include the advertisements. But there is one thing you can trust; both these survey companies do place YouTube and Hulu at the correct relative places: at number one, and number two. Perhaps comScore does this intentionally; if Hulu’s numbers look much more impressive when reported by comScore, they will love how they can get better advertising rates from their partners. It is somewhat possible, that all YouTube clone sites would choose to be rated by comScore and not Nielsen. It makes them look much bigger to the advertiser.
Corporations find New Uses for Social Media
If the social media aren’t hot-houses of product promotion today it is not because there is no one in charge of any business marketing department out there who understands how to take the best advantage policies in a phenomena. At advertising agencies around the world, marketing experts can think of nothing other than the whole hoopla around viral advertising campaigns on the social media. The mad rush for advertising on the social media will happen soon enough; but perhaps this may not entirely be a good thing for the open and friendly community that Facebook and Twitter have grown a reputation for. With too much going on that is glittery and commercial, social media may soon cease to be particularly social, with the conversations, the quiet atmosphere, that will help people latch on to an idea and make it blossom. But for now, here is one way in which they really are using social media in the true tradition of the community.Consider the Fiesta campaign that Ford undertook on the social media recently. What Ford did was to round up a hundred regular people off the street, to drive and review the latest Fiesta on Twitter, primarily, but also on Flicker and YouTube. It did work exactly as they planned; viewership on YouTube has been through the roof. Twitter has seen nearly five million impressions of the whole Fiesta deal. But the more important question here is,has it actually sold anything for Ford?
Companies do not look to social media to help them sell anything, although it must be committed that their Fiesta movement certainly got a lot of sales inquiries from potential customers. With the whole buzz they generated from this, they got lots of user input on how to improve the Fiesta, and make it better for the American customer. It’s easy for those corporate executive types to grow too insulated from the everyday people who make their company profitable. They gain a valuable ability to actually see the dialogue blossom between the car designer and car user, filled with the kind of urgency, the emotion that goes with car ownership. This has to be one of the best uses that the social media have found so far. Of course, GM tried it recently, and they were not pleased. You do have to have a certain amount of basic goodwill to go on, before you go asking people what they think of you.
Is Facebook Bigger than even Google?
We’ve often heard, that Google and Facebook are seen to be in direct competition. Unless the “direct competition” spoken of refers to the mindspace occupied by the companies, people often wonder how a search company can be in competition with a social media company. But if you think about it, this isn’t really difficult to conceive of.
facebook
It would be difficult for the provider of any online information or service, to top a search engine in user traffic: search engines are our first port of call when we open a browser. For the first time though, social networking sites are pulling in more visitors, then even the search engines. Once an Internet portal has an irresistible product, it brings power that allows it to change the very way the Internet is run. For instance, YouTube has achieved a certain critical mass of videos on such a variety of subjects, and that there are a good number of young people who feel no need to search on Google to read about anything. They just search on YouTube, for a video on the subject they are interested in. In fact, YouTube is now the second largest search engine after Google.
So what happens if the social media sites become so enormously popular, that even search begins to take second place? To begin with, people would be subscribing to updates on Twitter and Facebook, more than RSS ever succeeded in getting us to do. Perhaps the very concept of the browser would be threatened. And just as free access to all the newspapers of the world is driving publishers of physical books and papers to bankruptcy, and throwing up protests of how quality in publishing will suffer, free access to information on people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, would perhaps send up another wave of protests that there will be no way of determining quality, if people begin to look directly to sharing with Internet friends, as a way to gain basic knowledge. Such a fundamental game changer, would shake up the established business plan that Google controls now.
Letting the Fun of YouTube Trick You into Lowering Your Guard
The thing about the Internet is that in sitting in your home, putting your thoughts and personal information out, you are tricked into believing you have privacy; and in a password-protected Internet life how easy it is to take for granted how vulnerable we become without it.
Everyone has elderly relatives who need to be in on all that happens in the lives of the children in the family – birthday parties, school events; often, to help the technically uninitiated elderly relative, people just post their children’s pictures and videos on a place like Facebook without password protection or even on a YouTube clone website. They figure that their video is lost in the crowd of millions of others; what predator is really going to find it?
People only wake up to how easy it is for people to find it, when things get out of hand; people anywhere on earth roam the Internet, put together freely available media files and use them for anything – for a school project, for plastering all over the walls of a city a thousand miles away to advertise a baby show, or merely to share among friends. It can be very easy to let one mistake get out of hand.
Even where personal views on the subject tend to the liberal, there is always the serious consideration of how other people might react to your media-posting activities. Birthday party pictures, school event videos and the like, usually include images of other people’s children too. People take a dim view of having decisions about their children taken without their consent. If the parent of a friend of your child’s finds a picture of his child at your child’s birthday at a recognizable restaurant or park, they can right away worry about how a sick predator out there can find their child if they wish to. There’s also the matter of setting a good example for your child in online safety; if you go about posting personal pictures at random on the Internet, how will you ever tell your child to exercise caution himself?
Will online video replace TV?
Bored of watching the same stuff on TV? Here’s something you could try – get to a computer that is connected to the internet, key in what you would like to watch, and voila, a list of websites that are going to interest you pops up. Remember to type the phrase “+video” along with whatever else you’re keying in. For example, if you are searching for videos on yoga exercises, type “yoga exercises + video”. This will make sure the results show only those pages that have videos of yoga.
Here we have listed some recent reports about online videos, gleaned from various sources.
“Online clips were watched more than four billion times by over 30 million people,” according to internet monitor comScore.
“YouTube was the big winner though, pulling in almost 24 million unique users, meaning it reached 77% of everyone who watched videos online” – BBC.
Another statistical report from comScore states that “over 150 million Americans (80 per cent of the entire U.S. internet audience) watched over 14 billion videos online in December.”
So how have online videos reached this position within a fairly short period of time? It’s actually quite simple. Anyone can find videos on absolutely anything, gardening, exercises, mobile phones, healthcare, lectures, arts, cultures, history, animals are just some of them. The best part is that these videos are free. The availability of TV shows online is another big reason for the popularity of online videos.
Even if you can’t find the videos you’re looking for, all you have to do is ask for it on forums, and within a few minutes, an unknown face will tell you where to find it. You might either get links to the video, or somebody might even upload it for you if they have it.
Owing to this kind of simplicity in getting desired information at zero cost, online videos have become the most preferred way to learn. Entertainment and advertising are two other fields where online videos are immensely popular. It seems now that online videos are replacing traditional television. Giants like Google have been able to foresee these effects and bought YouTube.com.
In the future, the world will turn more and more to online videos, for almost all of life’s solutions. Even special events like birthday parties, wedding ceremonies, Thanksgiving Day celebrations, inaugural functions etc can be shared with the world through online videos. They have more advantages than the TV any day.
Everyone relies on video sharing sites to share them, and millions of videos are uploaded in popular sites daily. In order to maintain their site’s efficiency, webmasters of popular sites are forced to remove some of them, as has happened recently with YouTube. People are now on the look out for more powerful video sharing sites, to be able to upload an unlimited number of videos.
This would be a good time to start your very own video sharing website. Pick up a readymade script and get to work!
Is Rayzz better than YouTube?
YouTube is known as the best video sharing site among the Internet worms. To err is human; with no exceptions the YouTube also got some shortcomings. Knowledge rests on error also, so we learnt from the errors of YouTube. Our developers tried their best to overcome these shortcomings, and came out with brand new video sharing script – Rayzz which is not only the YouTube clone but also has handpicked features that you can’t dream of in the YouTube.
To be fair, we’re listing the 5 reasons why the Rayzz stays ahead of the YouTube.
1. Video format support:
YouTube lets the site users to upload some specific formats like Windows AVI, MOV, or MPEG format. But our Rayzz supports almost all the video formats set by webmaster in the control panel, while maintaining the video quality.
2. High – quality content:
Tons of high quality contents = tons of users = tons of money.
YouTube allows the users to put crappy contents on their website. It’s not technically spam but it’s useless. This sort of content may get you traffic, but it isn’t gonna get you paid. Our Rayzz assists you to get both. Webmaster can control the publishing of the articles; hence you can post only the articles with rich content thereby bringing effective traffic on your site. Apart from this, your site can also reach the top ranking in search engines.
3. Uploading speed:
Youtube imposes a 10 minute or 100 MB tedious restriction on files sizes to upload Videos; hence the uploading speed is low. Rayzz on the other hand, make it very easy to upload the videos as it allows users to upload videos of smaller file size when compared to that of the YouTube. So members can upload the videos quickly.
4. Video quality: A picture’s worth a thousand words
The videos uploaded on the YouTube are automatically compressed and resized to the 320×240 format. So YouTube has low quality videos. But our Rayzz doesn’t performs such editing process, hence the uploaded videos will be played with an excellent quality than what you’ll get on YouTube.
5. Revenue option:
YouTube doesn’t have any options like revenue sharing on the site. But our Rayzz will provide that special feature. It is a great way to earn extra income by taking part in the community.
If you have a small budget and are just looking to get something up quick, Rayzz – Video Sharing Script is the perfect choice for you. Rayzz is an awesome service, and it surpasses YouTube in that right.
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