Video Search Semi-wanted

Google’s made some news lately, this time by introducing Google Video, a tv search engine.  Google searches TV shows, mostly broadcast shows with closed-captioning text.  Neat idea, useful to some I’m sure.

There are other video searches on the net though: here’s one from Yahoo and one from AOL’s Singing Fish.

Yahoo links to the page with the video.  Singing Fish links to the main website, and then directly to the video.

While these two may be nice for the average user, I can’t see many webmasters being thrilled about this - especially about Singing Fish, who are basically helping suck the bandwidth (currently, still a huge cost) from websites.  This may not matter to some corporate types, or people who are just hosting on free accounts; but the common webmaster running a small to medium-size website with just one popular video clip may eventually suffer if Singing Fish ever became popular.

There are methods to prevent hotlinking, but nothing’s currently foolproof.  Luckily, these services are currently all from big corporations and all are properly recognizing robots.txt files. Yahoo, Singing Fish.  Believe it or not, not all webmasters are aware of how to properly write a robots.txt file, so some may not discover this solution until after they receive a large bill from their host.  I’m sure whenever Google moves away from just TV and starts including web video searches they’ll do the same in regards to a robots.txt file.  The problem will come when another not-so-respectable engine emerges, and it’d be foolish to think it won’t happen.

Posted by David M Singer on Jan 25, 2005 at 03:01 PM

Comments:

Commenting is not available in this channel entry.

Next entry: ESPN Broadband Remade Into ESPN 360

Previous entry: Escape from the Universe

<< Back to main