SneakCast is the first video search engine from India, focusing on the vertical search market
The site has been launched couple of hours ago and here is quick QnA with the founders of SneakCast:
- Looks like (and correct me, if I am wrong) – SneakCast is more of an aggregator which crawls through various video sites?
Yes, I accept that SneakCast is an aggregator and that is only because not even “GOOGLE” has the engine to only ‘index’ the video content so even they have to aggregate. You must be aware that indexing can only be carried out ONLY to collect text data, HTML keywords etc. Which in the case of videos is not possible at this moment due to presence of embed codes, which is again different for different websites. So we aggregate videos from websites spread out on the ‘WWW’. - You mentioned SneakCast is India’s first vertical search engine – What’s so Indian about it (the fact that you guys built it from India or you will crawl more Indian content?)
I say ‘Indian’ because we are Indians who developed the idea, we are based in India and again this is the first time that a video search engine has been launched on the Indian shores. - Whats’ your USP? Why should one search using sneakcast – I can always go to Ulinkx and search across youtube/google/yahoo/metacafe etc videos . Technically, whats your differentiator.
You speak about Ulinkx which has BUGS all over their website.. Their rating system hardly works Ashish. SneakCast is the engine which has its own algorithm developed right from scratch. The results displayed are NOT only based on our algorithm but also on ‘User Voting Input’.
All the results are ranked according to their credibility which is created by our users themselves. Everything, is kept out in the open for our users.If they like the video you help it climb up the ladder but IF NOT then ofcourse it climbs down or even crashes down the ladder.SneakCast spits out video results quicker than ‘Dabble.com‘ and more RELEVANT search results. Also, we are not only giving results from Youtube and those 5 different websites but from about 100′s of them out there. So to be very honest with you Ashish SneakCast’s main technical differentiator is its ‘Algorithm‘.
SneakCast is currenly in beta phase. It won’t be right to review the product now (I am sure there are jagged edges), hence do give SneakCast a spin and share your comments.
Well, the algorithm seems to be very effective in searching the video’s which could be in diff. formats, but how good if u could show a porn video when i search the keyword ” INDIA”
I guess, they should have a filter mechanism to bring this in effect,
well, nice aggregator for Videos though
Very interesting!! All the best to these guys!
Thumbs Up for those Guys. It’s insanely great. Keep up the Passion.
If it is India video search engine, Then it should at least give good relevant result about the Cricket. Try to your self. It’s not even close to result of Dabble & uLinkx.
http://www.sneakcast.com/search?q=cricket&Search=Search
http://dabble.com/search/node/cricket
http://www.ulinkx.com/video/search?q=cricket&sort=date&s=ulinkx
Sri and Raju: I will forward these feedbacks to SneakCast team. Yes, the current state of product may not be in a great shape, but I hope they improve on this.
Ashish
I hope you have forwarded my recommendations (and hack findings) to SneakCast guys..
Hello Sri,Raju and Ashish,
Firstly thank you for riding SneakCast and sending in feedbacks, I really liked them. As far as crticism is concerned, no product is excellent until and unless there is some criticism about it.
Anyways, lets get on with Sri’s advice about ‘filters’. We have been testing filters, looking at filters of different web sites etc and have found that none had great filtering rates. We did try Mary Hodder’s “Dabble filter” searched for keyword ‘Google’ and we got results ranging from ‘french couple in some sex position’ to ‘a lady in lingere’ and what not (striptease too). So we dont want to add a filter UNTIL and UNLESS we perfect it. We are developing and testing different mechanisms and will surely launch a true ‘filter’. So Sri we do need some time for this.
Next, Raju thank you for sending in those links from dabble and Ulinkx for ‘cricket’ but I think you have got us wrong here. By saying ‘Indian’ doesnt mean we’ll restrict our search only to India. The algorithm has been developed to show the best and the most relevant result for what you have typed in the ‘search box’. But as I had said earlier ‘SneakCast’ has more than a dozen key features in pipeline and we are all working on them to only perfect them. We dont have a huge team, no huge money support too. So there are many things we have to consider to actually get the wheels in motion. But, Raju I assure you that the results will never show you irrelevant results. Thank you again
Guys, I am open to any suggestions you have. You can either ask Ashish (he’s a great guy!) to forward me your feedbacks or ask him for my contact. I’ll reply to every one of them.
Thank you once again.
I searched in Dabble and Sneakcast for dog:
http://dabble.com/search/node/dog
http://sneakcast.com/search?q=dog&Search=Search
Dabble had 115,948 results
Sneakcast had 346 results.
Why is the Sneakcast founder crowing about this? They aren’t even on the same Cricket field as Dabble.
I’d like to see performance at Sneakcast when they have 30 million videos in their index and then compare to Dabble.
The funny part is that on their “about us” pages, they say “Dear users,
I personally welcome all the users who are willing to use SneakCast for entertainment purposes. I have come up with this ingenious idea of providing best quality movies i.e. mostly ‘DVD quality’ all at one place.”
And the letter is unsigned. Personally unsigned. I think they have a long way to go before I will take them seriously.
Pingback: Mid-week Internet Buzz: Naukri gets a makeover, Matrimony search is hot..and more | pluGGd.in
Pingback: Indian Startups in 2007 : Good times ahead! |Startups in India, Coverage of India Business
Pingback: SneakCast joins the short-circuit pool? |Technology and Business Startups in India
I heard that first video search engine from indy is ulinkx.com?
Is it alright? Anyway… congratulation~~!!! your site will get bright future.. because next internet, video portion is the most important area within next whole internet world. I will keep watching your site what’s going on future~~~ Good ~~~