My kids watch a lot of content through the iPlayer and one of the things that I’ve noticed is they use Google to search iplayer: Google is their default way in to web content. Fine. However, Google returns urls for programmes that are beyond the 7 day window, whereas searching from iPlayer itself brings back only those programmes within the 7 day window.
Searching for “iplayer (programme name)” you get the most ‘relevant’ search results, in this case an episode of the programme rather than say, the series, as it turns out there is no concept of a “series” as the model for iPlayer is based on pips (programme information pages), now pids (programme IDs), the key thing there being ‘programmes’:
And, this is the view when following that top link for “something special” a cbeebies programme (which my eldest son finds for my youngest):
This is the view from iPlayer for the same search:
To make matters worse when you land from Google the programmes that are presented back as “similar” are not from the series “something special”, they’re not even from the same strand, cbeebies (they’re from cbbc).
It can’t be difficult to resolve the out of date programmes displayed when coming from Google to those within the seven day window can it?
Tagged: search iplayer