Searching YouTube and MySpace
I received an email recently from an NBC producer who needed to find Iraq videos from his network that had been posted on YouTube. It's a common problem.
YouTube and similar sites have muscled into the domain of traditional web news sites (as if wtechnology that has only been around just over a decade 'traditional.') Just think of how YouTube helped spread the cell phone footage of Saddam Hussein's execution. Or how U.S. politicians are already using YouTube for their presidential campaigns.
Meanwhile, social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook or Friendster are becoming important resources for finding people for news stories or leads.
Each of these sites has its own internal search engine, of course, but they can sometimes be clumsy or inaccurate
There is no perfect solution to these new challenges for web searching. But let's look at some tools and tricks you can use.
DOMAIN SEARCHES
The easiest solution for all these sites is to use Google's powerful domain search feature in Google Advanced at www. (See Media Magazine # ).
Go to www.google.com/advanced_search.
Put in whatever keywords you want - -for example:
NBC Iraq
NBC Iraq
Next, scroll down to the ninth line down labeled DOMAIN. (highlighted in yellow above)
This allows you to narrow your search to one web site or domain. Put in www.youtube.com (it is important NOT to put in the "http://"
You will then get results of all of the YouTube postings that use the words NBC and Iraq in their descriptions. Now, this does not mean those words will appear in the video, but it is usually a good bet someone's description of their posted video will be reasonably accurate.
VIDEO SEARCHES
You can also use search engines that specifically look for videos. These tools search for descriptions and sometimes for the words encoded in the video file descriptions. (A few are also trying to developing the ability to scan for the words used in the video, but this is still preliminary).
One Japanese-based site has been set up expressly to search YouTube and similar video sits, with the neat name Qoogle. (It is at video.qooqle.jp.)
Google itself, of course, has its own video search term at video.google.com- -and Google conveniently owns YouTube.
You often get different result using the same keywords in different video search engines and in Google Advanced, so it pays to try various searches on different sites.
SEARCHING MYSPACE
Everyone from rock groups to lonely teenagers to BBC have MySpace pages. There are more than 100 million accounts - and some of them may be the people you need for a story.
Again, MySpace has its own fairly decent search engine but I always start with a domain search at Google Advanced. (The same trick applies to Facebook, Friendster and other social networking sites; just put in their web address in Google's domain box.)
There are also specialized search engines that try to favour MySpace. One of these, shown below, is IceRocket at www, icerocket.com.
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