Disadvantages of being big

abhishek — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 10:58:57 -0800

Long time no blog. I have just been too busy with my new job. But the experience I had today I thought was worth sharing.

A while ago someone sent me a link to a David Blaine paroday on YouTube. I really liked it and after about 2-3 weeks wanted to show it to my friends. But I had forgotten the name of the magician. The only thing I remembered was that it was on YouTube. So, I go back to YouTube and try to find it. I use keywords like magic, magician, trick, crazy, funky, freaky and so on. The things I thought described the video. YouTube always came up with a search result of over 200K videos. I went up to 10th page and then gave up. There is no way you can browse through all those videos and find the one you are looking. So, I give up on YouTube and head to MetaCafe.

The same search query on MetaCafe results in far less search results (they simply don't have those many videos). I thought it would be easier to go through these search results (the assumption I made was that the video was so cool that it was bound to be found on other video sharing sites). Indeed the video was found around 4th page.

I wonder if there is a lesson to be drawn from this. As the content on a site grows it becomes very complicated and difficult to find it. When the web was small you practically "knew" all the sites on the Internet, then came directories and search engines. It seem to work fine for text, but video is a whole different ball game. One of the solutions to this problem was supposed to be tagging, but it's definitly not enough. So far, it seems that the assumption that if something is good enough it would be also found on smaller sites holds true. What makes it easier to find things on smaller sites? The fact that you can browse through all the content much faster. The size does bring some disadvantages with it.

The video in question is here.

The XORBlog: Disadvantages of being big

Disadvantages of being big