Search the words, not the titles
People do not remember what a series was called. They remember one thing somebody said.
In short
Search on Generated Worlds indexes every subtitled episode's dialogue. Typing a remembered line returns the episodes that contain it, and opening a result starts the episode at that line. If the episode is not open to that viewer, the result shows what it belongs to rather than pretending it does not exist.
Search on a video platform is usually built on the metadata: titles, genres, descriptions, tags. That works for the viewer who knows what they are looking for, and it is exactly useless for the most common real case — somebody who saw a clip on Instagram, remembers one line, and cannot name the series it came from. A title search for a line of dialogue returns nothing, and returning nothing reads as 'we do not have it'.
01What it does
- Every episode with a subtitle track is searchable by its dialogue.
- A hit opens the episode at the moment the line is spoken, not at the beginning.
- A line inside an episode the viewer cannot open yet still appears, named and attributed, with the way to open it — a dead end is worse than an offer.
02Why this is a creator feature as much as a viewer one
A short drama's reach comes from clips travelling on platforms that do not link back. The line of dialogue is what survives that trip; it is the thing a viewer carries from a Reel to a search box. Making the line findable is the closest thing to a link that the clip never had.
What it does not do
It only knows what the subtitles say. An episode without a subtitle track is invisible to this search, and dialogue transcribed automatically inherits every mistake the transcription made — names in particular. Searching for a character's name is the least reliable thing you can do with it.
Questions
- How do I find a short drama from a line I remember?
- Type the line into search on Generated Worlds. Subtitled episodes are indexed by their dialogue, so the line returns the episodes it appears in, and opening one starts playback at that moment.
- Can I search inside an episode I have not unlocked?
- Yes. The line still appears in results with the episode and series it belongs to, along with the way to open it.
Keep reading
- A desktop layout that stops wasting the screen
Full screen on a computer now puts the vertical picture on the left and the episode list on the right, instead of a phone-shaped video floating in black.
- Viewer Journey: see which episode loses your audience
Viewer Journey shows a short drama creator how far viewers get through their series, which episodes hold them and what they did next — with a worked example of how to read the charts.
All posts from the Generated Worlds Tech Blog.