December 24, 2007

Interview with Microsoft's Mike Nichols

This week my interview is with Mike Nichols of Microsoft. We spoke about image search, video search, and celebrity search. With Microsoft's recent set of releases, their new video search engine was unveiled for the first time. One of the more interesting aspects of Microsoft's video search engine is the smart preview feature.

Mike showed me a great demo of a Baron Davis dunk (then select the video titled "Baron Davis dunks on AK-47 in Game 3"). The video is 25 seconds long, but the dunk happens only at the end.

The smart trailer technology is able to algorithmically figure out that the focal point of the video is at the end. As a result, the trailer Microsoft offers at the video selection screen goes right to the most important part of the video, to enable the user to better decide is this is a video that they want to watch.

It really sparks some interesting thoughts about the nature of the algorithms to determine the most important part of a video. One possible approach is simply to evaluate the video as a whole and then use a set of algorithms to figure out what part of the video is the most different from the rest of the video.

Whatever techniques Microsoft decided to use, it's clear that there are a large number of different scenarios that they have to deal with. In the case of the Baron Smith dunk, there is clearly a significant increase in crowd noise right at the end of the video. However, not every video provides a clue as simple as an great increase in crowd noise.

Posted by Eric Enge at 8:33 AM | Permalink

August 1, 2006

MSN Assigns Names To Vertical Search Crawlers

I covered news at my blog this morning that MSN has assigned names to all their robots or crawlers. When MSN Search first launched, they had one robot named, msnbot. MSNbot did the work of all, from normal web search to image search to news and images. Now, MSN has clarified the roles and assigned names to each robot.

The MSN Shopping bot is msnbot-products, the MSN News bot is msnbot-news, the MSN Image Search bot is msnbot-media and the MSN Search bot is still msnbot. This is important for SEOs, now you can define in your robots.txt file if you want msnbot-media to index your images or not.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:53 AM | Permalink

April 5, 2005

Google Images Wins Cherry Tomato Challenge For Attribute Indexing

Tim Bray tests whether Google, Yahoo and MSN image search services can find images that make use of keywords only within the the ALT and TITLE attributes of an image tag. Google is the only one that can. The Cherry-Tomato Challenge and A Cherry-Tomato Winner tells the story.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

Google Images Wins Cherry Tomato Challenge For Attribute Indexing

Tim Bray tests whether Google, Yahoo and MSN image search services can find images that make use of keywords only within the the ALT and TITLE attributes of an image tag. Google is the only one that can. The Cherry-Tomato Challenge and A Cherry-Tomato Winner tells the story.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

Google Images Wins Cherry Tomato Challenge For Attribute Indexing

Tim Bray tests whether Google, Yahoo and MSN image search services can find images that make use of keywords only within the the ALT and TITLE attributes of an image tag. Google is the only one that can. The Cherry-Tomato Challenge and A Cherry-Tomato Winner tells the story.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

Google Images Wins Cherry Tomato Challenge For Attribute Indexing

Tim Bray tests whether Google, Yahoo and MSN image search services can find images that make use of keywords only within the the ALT and TITLE attributes of an image tag. Google is the only one that can. The Cherry-Tomato Challenge and A Cherry-Tomato Winner tells the story.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

February 22, 2005

Picsearch Powers MSN's Image Search Database

"Official" word today that Picsearch is powering the image search database at MSN. Again, this is just an official announcement. Picsearch has been working with Microsoft since image search was added to the MSN Search beta back in November. Picsearch also provides its database to Ask Jeeves, Lycos Europe, and many other sites.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

Picsearch Powers MSN's Image Search Database

"Official" word today that Picsearch is powering the image search database at MSN. Again, this is just an official announcement. Picsearch has been working with Microsoft since image search was added to the MSN Search beta back in November. Picsearch also provides its database to Ask Jeeves, Lycos Europe, and many other sites.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

Picsearch Powers MSN's Image Search Database

"Official" word today that Picsearch is powering the image search database at MSN. Again, this is just an official announcement. Picsearch has been working with Microsoft since image search was added to the MSN Search beta back in November. Picsearch also provides its database to Ask Jeeves, Lycos Europe, and many other sites.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

Picsearch Powers MSN's Image Search Database

"Official" word today that Picsearch is powering the image search database at MSN. Again, this is just an official announcement. Picsearch has been working with Microsoft since image search was added to the MSN Search beta back in November. Picsearch also provides its database to Ask Jeeves, Lycos Europe, and many other sites.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBack