Feature request: Searching for videos by tag (rather than searching within videos)

[JamesB0yd]

Use tags to find videos or clips in videos.

To me the power of this tool isn't to make a single video easier to navigate, but to find the videos in the first place.

[cxam]

Thanks for first feature request @JamesB0yd. I intentionally didn't include any features to browse/search in the initial version as this usually depends on the availability of content (tagged videos). My plan was to measure the uptake in content creation and see if a browse/search feature would be useful to anyone. I also wanted to focus on the actual tagging aspect and create a simple UI/UX as this would be the highest barriers to entry to use the service. However, this is a feature that I would like to bring in.

Just to clarify your suggestion further:

• Tag searching would be by either name and note data.
• Would you see a benefit in Tracks also being searchable?
• Should you be able to search for tags with a certain duration?
• Tagged videos should be published as private with the option to allow them to be publicly browsable/searchable?

[JamesB0yd]

Understood - there needs to be something to search.

I think where my confusion comes from is not understanding your objective. You're making it easy to label snippets of video. I'm concerned with browsing based on the textual label(s) those snippets have.

• Tag searching would be by either name and note data. Possibly. Search by exact tag or combinations of tags would be of interest. By "Tag" I meant the text label(s) applied to a clip. I'm not sure if you refer to "Tag" as the actual video clip segment.

• Would you see a benefit in Tracks also being searchable? To be honest this isn't a feature that I understand and see the benefit of yet. It could be what I mean by a "tag" is what you mean by a "track".

• Should you be able to search for tags with a certain duration? Related to #2, I think the usefulness to me is not in searching for tags inside a video but in searching for the video itself by tags applied overall to the video. Of course clips within a video are also themselves videos, and duration could be a valuable attribute to assess quality of the available clip.

• Tagged videos should be published as private with the option to allow them to be publicly browsable/searchable? The labels/tags would need to be public.

[JamesB0yd]

As a feature, Youtube could add what Tagx does, or a lot of the same thing can be done by content creators in the descriptions/annotations/comments, but "cross-platform" tagging (+indexing) of videos won't be replicated by a site that wants everyone on their platform.

By having more powerful user-contributed data attached to each video, Tagx could become a better search engine to find videos. Right now people go to Youtube because they expect it will have everything. If something else has everything, that might take over that role.

[cxam]

I think we might be talking about the same thing here but I'll clarify.

A Tag is a segment within a video identified by a start and an end time. In addition, a tag can contain a text value for the name and additional textural data as a note. For example, in a conference video, I could create a tag starting from 5:00 - 10:00 and name this iPhone X.

A Track is a collection of tags. It would allow you to put similar tags into a group to organise your tags better. For example, in a football video, you could create a track named Goals and assign all the goal tags to this. Likewise, Corner Kicks could be a different track. So if you were only interested in the goals, you would simply play the goals track and not be bothered with corners.

For the browsing/searching, imagine you want to search for iPhone X. The way I understood from this feature request is that you should be able to see all the videos that have tags with the name value iPhone X (or whatever smart searching logic happens in the background). In my conference video example, someone else might have tagged an Apple product review video where a tag within it is named iPhone X. Upon searching for iPhone X, the user should see the conference video and also the product review video. Let me know if I completely misunderstood this request.

I agree with you about YouTube being able to implement all this functionality and I actually think they don't really want users to find what they want instantly. They live off views and that comes from user engagement on site. If they were to offer more accurate searching, then engagement goes down as users are less likely to be diverted from their initial search. I'm starting to see this being a key feature going forward for Tagx. I could even try and populate the videos on here with data already available through their API to build up the initial index.