Feedback needed: Scryer - a new search engine for videos and podcasts
I made a post recently complaining about how it's seemingly impossible to get any actionable feedback from people using the demo I've created, and it was suggested that I just post it on forums and ask the internet.
Check out the demo here: https://scryer.xyz
I am not trying to sell this to anyone on IH, I genuinely just need feedback.
It's very much a WIP and there are a lot of problems with the data integrity and the UX. Assuming I can fix those issues: What I'm interested in knowing is, if it was fixed up and expanded, is this valuable? Also, is there something particularly bad about the data/UX that jumps out?
I'm looking for brutal realistic feedback, not "this is cool".
Any kind of actionable feedback would be greatly appreciated, and I'd be happy to also provide feedback on other people's projects if they link to them as well.
Thanks
I feel like you are trying to solve a problem nobody really has.
I'm perfectly happy with the YouTube search, as are probably most of the people that use it.
Who are the people that will benefit from your product?
Finally! This is great feedback. I'll try to defend the idea:
I can understand the sentiment that YouTube's search is good enough for most needs. However, for me, I often try to find new to me content and find it incredibly hard sifting through and trying different queries to find videos of people talking about the topics I'm interested in. Essentially I rely on YouTube's suggestions to find new stuff, which isn't great. Googling "youtube search sucks" also returns plenty of results of people complaining about it. Those people might be happy with an unbiased and content-based solution.
For example, I might be specifically interested in finding content talking about "unclogging a dryer". Instead of getting generic results, I'd get direct results with timestamps. Maybe Jake Paul talked about it once, and has a good solution.
Also, the extraction of metadata like mentioned people and media helps viewers interact with the podcasts they listen to, instead of having to manually find and re-play sections of the video or hoping the author put the info in the description.
This kind of tool could be useful for "power users", people who are looking to explore the back-catalogues of their feeds, researchers looking for specific information (ie. finding things in 3 hour long medical lectures), etc.
It seems to me that the demo doesn't convey this power well enough, and I think the point is that this tool would essentially act as a client, with the metadata always ambient so while you're listening to something and someone says "I just read this great book called <NAME>" and you jump and say "what was the title of that? let me rewind", instead it lists the title right under the timeline while you're watching it and gives you a link to Goodreads.
Fair enough. You're scratching your own itch, which is good in general.
Then we come to the point where we realize you are targeting "power users", for lack of a better term.
These are the people you should be talking to, and the ones that will be able to give you good and useful feedback.
How will you reach them? I have no idea, it's something you will have to figure out.
Actually the idea of searching through Youtube video content is pretty cool!
But I'm feeling that you want to do too many things, so users are confused what Scryer is about.
For me personally when I read the first senctence "YouTube's search is (intentionally) bad." my expectation was that I would be presented a search form and I could search Youtube for videos. But there isn't.
"We're trying..." and "Scryer will be a media..." doesn't sound as if there is anything yet to do on Scryer.
I'm still expecting some sort of search functionality and then out of the blue: "Try out one of the demo channels:"
What is a demo channel? Why do I want to see a demo channel? I'm confronted with all sorts of insights of channels I don't know, and I don't know what to do with them. What kind of problem can these insights of unknown channels solve for me?
I think you should focus on one functionality first and make it real good!
For example, call it "Advanced Youtube Search" and let the user search through the Youtube transscripts.
Best way to improve your product is connecting with your audience.
"Googling "youtube search sucks" also returns plenty of results of people complaining about it. Those people might be happy with an unbiased and content-based solution."
Reach out to those people and maybe they can help :)
Thanks, I agree there's too much right now. My current plan is to scale it back to per-video tooling only for now. So you'll still need to search for videos on youtube, but once you have a video you'll be able to see everything going on in it. That should be self-explanatory and useful for plenty of people.
As for finding these people, I guess the best bet is to check the threads on r/youtube and try to talk to them.
I love the idea. Just don't understand at all what happens in those demo channels.
If you could present me with a very concrete problem (like a youtube search gone wrong) and a very easy to understand way your solution fixes this with very concrete stuff, then I would be happy to take a look.
But right now you make me feel dumb. I simply don't understand it.
No worries, I get that the current UX is overwhelming, that's something that'll take a lot of work to get right.
So, here's an example of something that happened to me recently: I was watching Linus Tech Tips and Linus said something about a cult favorite game that people were playing called "Codeworld" or something like that. A few days later, I wanted to find a new game to play and remembered the video. I don't remember exactly which video, and I can't find a game called "Codeworld" anywhere, but I distinctly remember Linus saying "cult favorites" right before name-dropping the game.
This is how I'd try to find it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/LinusTechTips/search?query=cult favorites
On YouTube, I'm not sure which video it is, and even if I do I still have to watch the whole thing to find the part where he talks about the game.
And this is how I'd try to find it on Scryer: https://scryer.xyz/linustechtips/search?search="cult favorites"&sort=score
On Scryer, it finds the exact video and even shows me exactly where he says it (the little green dot). If I click on the dot it opens a panel showing a lot of contextual info about the video I'm watching, including all identified name-drops (in the Entities section).
Ideally "Crosscode" (the game I was looking for) would be listed as an entity, but I'm still working on the algorithm. It'll never be perfect, but I can get it to "good enough" where it finds most of the interesting stuff people might be looking for.
Hopefully that example clears it up a bit?
Sounds like some cool tech.
But then you have to input that you want to search Linux tech tips for it to find the video where something specific was said?
Still pretty cool though. It's like a personal detective. Give it clues and it looks deep.
Still think it's super nerdy and really hard to explain. The market for this must be quite niche.
If it could be narrowed down to "video search engine - search for anything said in a video and we will find that exact video for you" then it might be more simple and oddly might make the market for it bigger.
Right now it's simply too complex to understand what you do and what pain you solve. And that's like step 0 to solve if you wanna get anywhere in my opinion.
And then tomorrow Google calls and wants to buy your tech for $100M and I am all wrong :D
Because of all the feedback, I'm thinking it would be best to make it a browser extension that integrates with YouTube first. That way it's close to the source and easy to understand (it gives you cool metadata for external links and searching the current video).
No need for the dashboard, or bulk searching (yet), and it still solves the problem I outlined.
Then I can design it for nerds, researchers, and whatever.