Multimedia Search with Yahoo's Jeff Karnes

17:36 | Admin | Dec 21st, 2005 12:52pm |

Multimedia formats are changing the landscape of the search business. Yahoo’s multimedia guru Jeff Karnes talks with me about ‘multimedia’ search and how it is developing.

Multimedia search is one of those things that not alot of people are talking about but is a big deal. As we move into Web 2.0 and soon to be 3.0, the media format of choice will move from text to audio and video. Today most of the search engines don’t do a great job on searching multimedia. Yahoo is moving to change the landscape of multimedia search.

Full Transcript: Here is a link to the full transcript of the interview.

Highlights:

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: ….broadband subscribers now outpacing dial up subscribers. It is happening globally as well. So whether you look at Europe or Asia, broadband as an infrastructure has certainly grown, so I think you’ve seen that as a key influencer in terms of how people consume this (multimedia). And you’ve seen this with the amount of content coming online; not just video and audio, but images as well. So folks are consuming more and more of this (multimedia) on a daily basis. The second piece that has happened from a product perspective is the production costs and the barriers to entry have dramatically lowered. So as folks, weather they look at using consumer tools, editing tools, putting content online and using the internet as a distribution vehicle, has become fairly robust and easy to do. It has opened up a huge distribution channel for multimedia.

John Furrier, Founder of PodTech: New formats are coming in; you mentioned broadband and the ease of publishing. How are you guys handling that and from a product perspective

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: …Part of it was to align with our vision in search, which is to enable people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge. Part of that was to look at the vertical applications. We looked at the query logs and we looked at what the users were doing. We found that whether it was video, audio, or an image, there were a lot of folks that were doing that type of search. What we have recently done is we have started to introduce more discovery. So we do try to help you discover what is on the video Internet at any one time.

What we have also done outside of the front pages or the homepages with video search recently, is on the search results page. So we just recently launched two different views we have the grid view which is the normal key frame view so I can quickly scan the thumbnails and see what the video is out there. We also have a list view now that shows you any additional metadata that is associated with that particular piece of video. We also allow you to filter and say “Show me more from this particular site.” So it allows you to keep discovering. So we are helping from the expansion perspective to say, “I’m consuming, I’m discovering, let me help others consume and discover as well because a recommendation has a level of trust with my community.

John Furrier, Founder PodTech: Is tagging an open source search algorithm? Think about open source development, people will just chip in on projects but one little tag adds to the overall thing. It’s like open source search. You guys are pioneering that, right? Talk about that.

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: Yes, I think that it also puts search in the hands of the user. You know the statement, “The tyranny of the webmaster” right? I think tagging gets you around that because the users become much more involved in terms of their search experience. One of the key areas with that is with the community and the ability for users to share that and rate that and to use each other for trust and for relevance. I think from a tagging perspective that really opens it up for the users to do that. We are very excited about that particular element. So between the traditional automated ways of getting metadata, but also the new ways of getting metadata through tagging, that experience in combination really delivers that right discovery experience for users.

One example of the integrated experience for us is the recent release of our audio search product so it’s audio.search.yahoo.com we released it in August. There were three components to that experience. We’ve got music related queries and content, there’s other audio, so sound effects that type of thing, and then we also have podcasting. So between those three things we give the user and we’ve got over 50 million audio files in the index so through partners and through web crawling we really have a comprehensive and open index for folks to discover what is out there on the audio internet. What we’ve done in the results set is to integrate. … We want to hide the complexity of the back end, from the user. Where the user experience is simple, easy, and open. But the back end, whether it is the processing, the relevance, the search, the discoverability, all of those heavy lifting things we do ourselves.

John Furrier, Founder PodTech: So talk about how multimedia search is changing traditional search.

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: I think that is a really good question because you could just say let’s just make the multimedia experience part of the web experience and just create this unified search. From our perspective, users do consume multimedia differently. They do go to multimedia search for different purposes and they do expect a different experience from multimedia search. From our perspective, that is why we broke them out into separate vertical searches and are working to deliver those specific experiences for users and publishers to get the content into the system to get the users to come there and to start consuming and to get more engaged with that work flow and that user base and that discovery mechanism which is different from web. However, if you come for video search, image search, or audio search, certainly we like you to stay for web search. That is a big core competency of Yahoo and we are very proud of web search and so we use those vertical searches as a way to drag traffic that direction.

John Furrier, Founder PodTech: Talk about some of the highlights in your mind from a product…you must be proud of some of the stuff that you guys have done.

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: I’m proud of video search. The amount of progress we’ve been able to make coming out of beta, coming in beta in December, we launched in general availability back in April. The amount of partners, the amount of web content we’ve been able to get into the system, our launch of Media RSS as a way for the average consumer to send and syndicate content into our index. We are in fifteen different countries, translated into six different languages. We recently launched a new search results page that ties together finding more from a particular site, integrating with My web, and also to help that discovery mechanism. I’m proud of that release and the way that we’ve been able to take something that was new to the market in terms of this new market in December and really drive a lot of features, a lot of functions, and we’ve received a tremendous amount of positive user feedback on that. The second piece is on audio search and our ability to put that product together at a time when podcasting, along with music and other audio, were really starting to converge into a single experience. And for us to deliver that experience in the way that we did it from the user experience I was very proud of the team in terms of the way they were able to do that in a relatively short amount of time.

I think you will continue to see us align with the core search vision which is enabling people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge and share and expand.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 at 12:52 pm and is filed under PodTech, Yahoo, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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