Google - Video Clips Are Not Always Relevant

[kidder]

Why do we have to see so many youtube and now google video clips in the google search results? - should these types of results have their own checkbox / filter if Google considers them so important. If I want to find a youtube clip I go straight to the source, 99% of the time these clips are entertainment which means they don't deserve to populate the first page of the results so often. Yes the web and search is evolving but it's still about relevance, if I want a video then I'm typing into the search bar "widget video". So while Google is busy carving up the search traffic into less managable bites let them slice out most of the low budget poor qualtiy rubbish videos we are seeing.

[tedster]

I've been seeing decent relevance on the videos list through Universal Search, though I'm sure the relevance algo for non-text items still has rough sposts and will improve.

Whether we like Universal Search or not, it looks like it's here to stay.

[koan]

I do wonder how these 20 seconds video page manage to outrank whole sites dedicated on the subject.

[tedster]

For more than a year there has been a flag for some query terms - QDF (query deserves freshness) [webmasterworld.com]. As I see it, Universal Search needs to set some similar flags for "query deserves video", "query deserves news" and so on, throughout the various search verticals that Google offers.

One challenge of Universal Search has been getting the relevance scoring of the various vertical categories to be on a comparable scale with the regular organic results. Assigning keyword relevance to a video or an image is a hard problem altogether -- image search can still be a mess in some cases.

I can see that lining up a "query deserves video" flag with a strong enough video relevance scoring could be a major challenge for some queries. Not for media personality nmaes and such, but certainly for some product searches.

[koan]

Hi tedster, yeah I can imagine a query that is part of a family of similar queries (those found in the "suggested other searches") containing many other keywords such as "pictures" and "videos" would influence the addition of those in the SERPs. Good thinking. A search for "angelina jolie" would probably warrant adding pictures ;)

[kidder]

What about just giving the users a simple checkbox? Oh so easy. If video and images are such a problem users should have the option to opt for that type of search.

[santapaws]

maybe google is trying wean the general public off what we used to expect from the serps. More and more its their own links or links from their own sites like youtube. The you get the bits from news and im sure even more such related but not what i want from the serps type thing. The fact that you can focus your search to any topic i.e groups, news, books, but not for pure websites suggests to me a long term vision taking place here. Its already a bit sad that unlike the old days when you could stick a few words together and google would find tightly focussed and niche websites these days you may get two results like that then an ever broadening spectrum of sites and "STUFF" that may be related, even tenuously, but of no interest to me for me search. So im thinking rather than wonder how an algo places 20 seconds of phone-camera made video above a dedicated website, just be grateful that the website even shows at all.