It’s not like it’s something new. Alta Vista and AllTheWeb have been doing it for a long time already. It’s really more like a natural progression than a fresh idea. But when a big dog like Yahoo joins the pack you can be sure that other search engines (and surfers) will fall in line.
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"Some were thrilled at the marketing possibilities of video search while others bemoaned the potential abuses that lie ahead with such technology." |
This last December 2004, Yahoo launched the public version of their video search engine. Not but a week or so later, Google announced they had a Beta version of a video search. This news caused a good bit of buzz among adult webmasters. Some were thrilled at the marketing possibilities of video search while others bemoaned the potential abuses that lie ahead with such technology.
When it comes to adult content, video is king. Images are cool but it’s the vids that turn surfers into paying customers. It’s hard enough to get a porn site anywhere near the first page of a keyword search on an SE. Even then, you still have to draw the visitor to your page with only a line or two of descriptive text. In addition, your site has to fight for attention with the paid ads on most top-level search engines.
Video searching opens up a whole new venue for keywording. With a regular web search, the good keywords are all taken. If a user types “interracial anal movie” in a web search box, they’ll get about two million relative results. But if that surfer decides to use the video search engine the top results will go to the webmasters that named their media files for SEO.
Mind you, neither the technology nor the system is perfect. Google’s video search isn’t even operative. At the moment it only looks for words contained in a video and gives results as links to the originating websites. Currently, Google video search is indexing only television broadcast media.
Yahoo’s video search actually does spider for links to video files in formats like Real Media and Windows Media. The problem is the media file has to be syndicated through RSS. It’s not that hard to set up an RSS feed and there are also adult sponsors that provide content in RSS format. Additionally, Yahoo wants you to use Media RSS.
The cool part is Yahoo is accepting submissions for video content. Things may change but for now, a lot of webmasters are having success getting their adult content indexed this new way. Considering that Yahoo requires a fee just to consider listing an adult web page, this is a nice little window of gratis SEO fortuity.
A video clip is a powerful selling tool, particularly with your URL watermark or affiliate ID as accompaniment. You can lure the perverts to your web in a brand new way.
Still, that might not be a good thing for you. Some webmasters are concerned that video SE’s will bring nothing but leeches and high bandwidth charges. They would rather Yahoo search stay away from their collective video files. Right now these cautious smutmongers are rewriting .htaccess commands to protect their content and transfer costs.
The video search is a reality. The technology is limited but improving as I write this article. Yahoo uses Media RSS to search for audio and video files. Google is still in beta. As mentioned, Altavista and AlltheWeb allow surfers to look for video and audio without RSS. Other SE’s will follow suit. As a matter of fact AOL bought the video search service, SingingFish.
If you’d like to try out some of the video SEs, visit these links:
If you want to submit your media to a Video SE, try here:
Incidentally, Yahoo bought AllTheWeb and AltaVista not too long ago so if Yahoo indexes your video, it will likely appear in searches performed on the other two sites.
Search engines are changing. They’re getting better. The video search function is just one example of what’s to come. Just this week, Microsoft unveiled their very own search engine technology. Amazon opened their A9 search earlier this year. You can bet there will be more new ways to find stuff (porn) in the very near future.
Have fun with video searching. Embrace it. Research it. Get Cozy with it!
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