YouTube and Google: Too Many Copies
January 8, 2007 12:38 PM
Question for the day: Why doesn’t YouTube have a system to filter out multiple copies of the same video?
You’ve probably gone to the site before and found oh, say, 50,000 copies of the same video. Like, maybe, NBC’s “Dick in a Box” video. The NBC clip from “Saturday Night Live” has generated more than 9 million views on YouTube in less than one month, making if the 9th most popular video of all time on the site. But if you do a search on YouTube for “Dick in a Box,” you’ll see at least 10 different copies.
The same thing happened last week with the cell phone video of the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Both YouTube and Google Video posted several different copies of the same video. OK, it’s not that big a deal for me to add up the number of views from each copy to arrive at a total number of views for our Viral Video of the Week feature But it’s just easier for viewers to find ONE copy of a video.
Break, Revver, Veoh and Blip usually only have one copy of a video. Why can’t YouTube and Google smooth out their video-sharing sites a bit and just post one copy? I am confident the technology exists to do this easily. After all, we can put a man on the moon and all that.
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Fark 
StumbleUpon 