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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

This relates to my other peeve: trying to find the original video when something goes viral. Let's say I hear that Alice was seen telling Carol secrets about Bob. I go to Google/DDG/Youtube and search "Carol Alice secrets Bob" and get several dozen video results. ALL of them are other people trying to repackage the original video with their own commentary. News sites, bloggers, etc.

How do I locate the OG footage?

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I remember putting a feature request that Google append to the video description the original source. But then you devolve into the whole authenticity realm like with Twitter verified badges.

For certain things sorting by time is the easiest way to test for authenticity. It doesn't always work but it's usually the easiest way. This feels like a problem that Google should be able to solve, with their web crawler and video/photo recognition capabilities.

Oh for sure. I know it can be tricky to make that decision. Having some advanced search tools would help me do it on my own. What if I could see the results, and tell Google to show me the earliest video that has a runtime between x:xx and y:yy and is visually similar to a chosen result? With at least 50,000 views?

Maybe filter out all results posted by media orgs. Or show only those results that don't have cuts in them (almost all original footage is a continuous shot of a situation, with no titles, cuts to reporters or anchors, or introductions)

I think I'm headed down a rabbit trail of leveraging ContentID smarts for better searching and filtering.

That's exactly what we built internally. Not only a capability to identify the original video, but which portions of it are being shared the most, what's the most popular video, etc.

Technical challenge is one thing, but getting people to choose some random search engine over Google is incredibly hard, as Google spends billions of dollars to divert all the traffic to themselves.

Agreed. But if the original video was posted on a paywalled site then I would be looking at another site for it. So what I think it is, is that we want immediate access to the information we need to make are own judgement in this case a video. Then maybe we want to read some commentary. Most sites try force the commentary in your face coupled with adds before you find the actual video.

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