Yahoo Introduces TV Show and Movie Refiners for Video Search

While Google is making strides in real-time search, Yahoo has to sit back and work mostly on the front end and the user experience, as the underlying technology is pretty much a dead end facing an imminent replacement once the Microsoft deal gets underway. But it doesn't mean that there's nothing to show, the company has been introducing all sorts of features and updates. The most recent one involves its video search engine which has been getting some attention lately. When doing a search for a show or a movie, Yahoo will list its characters and popular episodes in the left sidebar along with the usual options.

“You can see that the left rail on our video search results page is becoming a place where you can use new ways to explore online videos. By hooking into the “Web of Things,” we have created intelligent contextual refiners to narrow down your search intent intuitively,” Nilesh Gattani and Ranjita Naik from Yahoo Video Search wrote. “The TV refiner that we are launching today organizes TV series queries into main characters, popular episodes, and seasons.”

The new features are similar to the ones Yahoo has been introducing lately, both on the video search engine and in the main one as well. Recently, it has launched similar features for music videos, allowing users to easily find related information for the band or song they were searching for. The new refiners extend the idea to TV shows and actors.

Searching for a TV show, like Arrested Development, will list the show's main characters, or rather the ones it finds the most videos for, but also the most popular episodes and the clips available from them. Similarly, searching for movie actors will list some of their most popular movies, allowing users to refine their search to videos exclusively from that movie.