Just launched: http://talkMiner.com (talkminer.com)

41 points by laurent_denoue ↗ HN
this is a video search engine for lectures and talks. It extracts keyframes like slides, analysis them with optical character recognition, and shows them in a nice UI for quick skimming.

29 comments

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At first I thought this was another "launch" of a skinned, Google custom search. Those tend to fade away when the curator loses interest, etc.

But looking at your about page it seems to be different, looks like you're doing an interesting and useful thing to find/index talks, good luck with the site!

I like the all-slide thumbnail view, that will be really useful.

The site is sweet. I really enjoy finding videos and searching through google is a pain. I can see this website be extremely useful. If you ever need any help with testing let me know.

I would definitely say once you get the core functionality done to work on some UI changes, which would really help out the look and feel.

I really like what I see. I think it would benefit from a "browsing" entry point as well as a search box, because I often want to see a stimulating lecture, but don't have a subject in mind.
I think the recently added talks let you browse through various talks without having any topic in mind.
I totally agree. When I land on a new site that has nothing but a search box, my mind goes blank. The recent links are nice, but I think more real estate devoted to really compelling, well-liked content would be really helpful for new people trying to 'get' it.
great idea. great execution. poor design. You did the hard stuff, now make it look good and you'll have the complete package. Nice work.
I think he should keep how it is. It's so simple.
Yeah, totally agreed. Just a few changes here and there to make the colors less garish and tweaks in the padding would make the content stand out better. Other than that, it's very functional.

He launched with the right MVP.

Removing some of the clutter can make it look better and even simpler.
A simple suggestion regarding the design - change the green term highlighting to something less overpowering (such as #ffc or #ffa). For me, just that small change would make an enormous difference.
This is a cool idea, I haven't seen something like this that's all encompassing. Ted.com is huge for talks within it's sphere, but for talks in general (as opposed to the more broad "videos in general (youtube) this seems ideal.
This is a cool idea, I haven't seen something like this that's all encompassing. Ted.com is huge for talks within it's sphere, but for talks in general (as opposed to the more broad "videos in general" (youtube) this seems ideal.
am i the only one that was expecting something to do with the trapped chilean miners?
No, I thought it'd be that too! Send a message to the trapped miners! Top answers will be curated/voted up and then sent along!
Interesting idea, very fast load times which was a delighter. One thing to think about is the name. When I first heard talkMiner I had no idea what to expect and now that I know I'm not sure if I'm loving the Miner part.
i liked it, i really liked it.

the first thing i've searched is "django" and i got an awesome result. :)

congratulations and wish you all the best.

Killer feature for me--if you made this thing automatically extract the text from talks, I would be willing to pay for it. I love talks but hate having to wait through the whole thing to get all the information.
Maybe crowd-rated "spoiler" comments. A succinct paragraph on the core point of the talk would be huge for me with some of this kind of content.
One minor suggestion: Do not shorten titles so aggressively (or at least add full title to title element). Here's an example: http://talkminer.com/searcher.jsp?q=scalability - all titles are prefixed by "Seattle Conference on Scalability:" and then almost all of the real title gets cut off.
Those short titles are coming from youtube. That is, the original youtube page for those videos has the 'truncated' titles. TalkMiner isn't truncating them.
There is no suggestions on incorrect spelling. Instead it just says no results found. WOuld be great if it can suggest a correct spelling.