Imagine that: You’ve spent a few hours creating a video for your blog or YouTube channel. After a few days you will find someone who will copy and republish your video on their website or video channel without giving you any credit! How would you feel? Angry and upset. Really? It’s called video storage… …and it’s real. But what if you don’t know if someone copied your video? Or aren’t you sure? Here comes the term ‘reverse video search’. Reverse video search helps you find places on the Internet where your video is used. In this article I’m going to share some tips to help you find a reverse video and find out who uses your videos…
What is Reverse Video Search? Understanding the basics
Reverse video search is a process in which the search engine uses the colors and pixels present in the video to find where on the network an exact copy of the video appears. Technically, this procedure is similar to the reverse image search. A search engine like Google has a huge database that is constantly updated by exploring and indexing new content as it appears on the internet. So if someone has copied your video and republished it on their blog or website, chances are Google will find it. When you perform a reverse search for your video in Google, it will be compared by color and pixels to find the best matches in your database. And that’s how it works!
When is your video likely to be plagiarized?
When it comes to plagiarism, images are more vulnerable to video. What for? Most people are not interested in watermarks, and for imitators it is much easier to upload an image than to upload and send a large video file! However, videos can be plagiarized, and these chances increase even more when they are plagiarized:
- The video material is of short duration. Short duration = small size = easy to load/discharge
- They don’t appear in person on the video. For example: Take a tour of the products without showing your face.
- You place the video without watermark
So if you want to make your video less vulnerable to plagiarism, work on the above points! Anyway, we will now discuss the different methods that can help you easily convert your search into video.
Can you perform a reverse video search?
Many can ask the question: If there is a reverse search engine for images, why not also for video? It is technically possible, but it may not be feasible at the moment. The reverse video search should index all videos on the Internet. And this job doesn’t end there. The search engine should also index each image of these videos and store them in its search database. At 30 frames per second, the 2-minute video has 30*120=3600 frames. This means that in a 2-minute video search engine 3600 images must be stored in the database!
So when someone uploads a video for a reverse search, the search engine starts comparing each frame of the video with the images already stored in the index. If the images match, the search engine will display a list of videos with exactly the same content. It sounds simple, but with millions of videos downloaded each day, imagine how much storage space and processing power you need!
Inverse video search methods:
Since there is no search engine that directly processes reverse video searches, we must look for other ways or tips to perform a reverse video search. And the trick is this: Reverse image search. This means that if we use screenshots of a video file and perform a reverse image search on it, search engines can in most cases recognize exactly the video from which the screenshot was taken. With the following methods we can easily perform a reverse video search:
1) Image search on Google reverse
Step 1) Open the video file and take a screenshot of any part of the video (you prefer to capture the images from the beginning). Also make sure that the screenshot shows a clearly visible face or object. So I took this screenshot of Katy Perry’s fireworks video on YouTube.
Step 2) Go to Google Images. Click on the small camera icon on the right side of the search field. Download your screenshot! Here we go.
Google will now show you the most accurate reverse search results for your video.
2) Try Yandeximages
Yandex (Russian search engine) is an excellent alternative to Google. Yandex’s ability to reverse image searching is even stronger when it comes to face and object recognition. For example, if you have a video where you are in front of the camera, Yandex can offer better backward search results than Google. That’s how we do it:
Step 1) Take a screenshot of your video (like we did with Google Images) This time I took a screenshot of Ellen Shaw interviewing Bill Gates.
Step 2) Go to the Yandex Images website and click on the small camera icon in the search box.
Step 3) Download the screenshot and press Enter. All the results of the reverse search are right in front of you. И… Don’t be surprised if they’re so brilliantly accurate!
3) Small
Tineye is another clever tool for searching for inverted images. If neither Google nor Yandex give you the results you want, try Tineye! Like any search engine, Tineye continues to search the web and indexes new images as they appear on the web. To date, the Tinye index contains 44.3 billion images!
However, the reverse search process for videos on Tineye remains the same:
Step 1) Take a screenshot of a video file
Step 2) Go to Tineye and upload or paste the URL of your image. Here we go.
4) Berry
Take another promising search engine for reverse image. The special thing about Berify is that it can not only perform a reverse image search, but also claims that it can perform a reverse video search! So I decided to consider Berify’s request and open a free account. With a free account you can view up to 5 images per month.
This time I took a screenshot of an even deeper video – Katy Perry’s fireworks.
Then I downloaded this screenshot into Berifit’s reverse search system. It took almost 2 minutes to find exactly the same or visually similar images. И.. :
I was impressed that she was able to return the results of the reverse video search of screenshots of the depth of this video! Google failed. But the letter was successful.
Your thoughts and criticisms?
I hope you were able to search your videos backwards with these methods without any problems. What do you think? I’d like to hear it. Please share your thoughts in the following comments.
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