Google Moves Into Video

prostoalex writes "Google will start indexing previously aired content from ABC, PBS, Fox News and C-SPAN and offer it as part of its Web search. No fancy speech-to-text recognition, just the closed captioning provided by the television networks, and no direct links to videocontent either." Right now, most of the channels are SF Bay area stations, but obviously more will be coming along. I saw a demo of this about six months or so ago - it's pretty cool, and interesting to see how far it has come.

Comments

Whoops

[DOS-5]

I know they're not linking directly but won't this kind of exposure have some sort of detrimental performance impact on their servers from the increased exposure?

Re:Whoops

[odyrithm]

"No fancy speech-to-text recognition, just the closed captioning provided by the television networks"

I'm sure papa google can deal with this :P

Re:Whoops

[zavfoud]

"detrimental performance impact on their servers from the increased exposure" This is google not World of Warcraft. ;)

Re:Whoops

[Anonymous Coward]

'detrimental performance'? Google? If they can't handle a slashdotting, who can?

Video Google (Beta)

Re:Whoops

[DOS-5]

Sorry for not being specific. By "they" I meant the sites hosting the actual video content.

Re:Whoops

[Lifereaper0]

When google indexes, I believe they store a copy of the text and you aren't actually going to the host site. I'm pretty sure that's how it works...That's why you can sometimes get images from sites that have shut down.

Re:Whoops

[Enrico Pulatzo]

Google is making it easier for people to find those clips online. It's good for them to do this, as it makes those websites more useful. If you can't find information online, why bother putting it online in the first place?

Not as good as it sounds

[ironfrost]

From the article:

Search engine analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research said Google's latest innovation is likely to disappoint many people because it doesn't provide a direct link to watch the previously broadcast programming.

Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show's narrative. The search results also will provide a breakdown on when the program aired and when an episode is scheduled to be repeated. Local programming information will be available for those who provide a ZIP code.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[dschuetz]

Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show's narrative. The search results also will provide a breakdown on when the program aired and when an episode is scheduled to be repeated. Local programming information will be available for those who provide a ZIP code.

Hey, even that is an great service. Of course, the closed captioning is rarely very good. I never understand how, on a show that was produced weeks before it was aired, the captions are often messed up, or missing key words. Captions (also on DVD subtitles) seem to be shorthand summaries of what was said, when it's usually possible for them to be exact transcripts.

Sometimes it's not a big deal, but sometimes they miss an important point or nuance.

What'd be great, though, is real honest-to-god searching of the audio. I've seen demos where you can literally type in "helicopter," and you'll get hotlinks to the exact times in the video wherever that word was said. It's fscking amazing. Not sure it's a publicly available technology yet, tho...but the capability is definitely out there, and I'm sure we're not the only people playing with this.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[Antonymous Flower]

Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show's narrative.

Sweet. I will never be without Oprah or Dr. Phil again!

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[jrumney]

Our mission is to organize the world's information, and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every day.

Also not as good as it sounds, apparently "the world" only extends to a few of the major US TV networks.

BBC already has video online, and they add subtitles to all content broadcast on BBC1 and BBC2, so it should have been easy to include them in the test. Given BBC's attitude towards the internet and making information freely available compared with most commercial broadcasters, they probably would have bent over backwards to help Google with this.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[Gamma_UCF]

Not exactly, at least for right now. If you search for a show, and click the link, there is currently a line that says "Video is currently not available". Does this mean that google eventually plans to link up the transcripts with the videos as well? Something like that would be really useful.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[Dougie Cool]

Well they did say it's their mission. That certainly implies that they've not managed it yet.

The BBC video online, AFAIK, isn't the same stuff as is shown on the telly. Most of the stuff on TV is separate from the stuff on the Internet.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[siphi]

Dublin City University are working on fischlar. It's similar. http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[siphi]

I'm sure their still trying to get enough disk space to cope with gmail. Then they might focus on buying disks for storing the video.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[LocoMan]

I have added subtitles to a few videos (I work on a video production place, and sometimes we get a video in english that a company wants subtitled in spanish for their people to see, or a video we made for them in spanish subtitled to english to distribute internationally to their clients), and subtitles/captions most of the times must be shorter than what was said (specially in fast dialogue) or most people will just not have enough time to read what was said. The general rule of using text in video is that it must be there on screen at least enough time to read it twice at a leisurely pace. Of course, this can't be used when doing subtitles or captions, but you can't really expect people to read as fast as it's spoken or more often than not they won't have finished reading by the time it switches to the next piece of text.

Not sure if you've seen it, but you should see some of the spanish subtitles I've read... sometimes even entire pieces of conversations are changed because the correct translation would take too long on the screen to read... and of course there are the odd translations that are completely off the mark (I remember a version of the wing commander movie I saw where the name of the main ship, the Tiger's Claw, even if it was written several times on the movie, kept being translated at the "Tiger's Clock")

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[earthman]

Keep in mind that not everybody is a highly trained speedreader. Sometimes you must summarize, otherwise you end up with either a screen full of text, or the captions flashing by like subliminal messages.

Of course there is no excuse for errors in subtitling if they had plenty of time for checking it.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[new500]

This was the plan that would make video search a killer tool :

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_ ra dio/3177479.stm

Summary : Exiled Director General of the BBC planned to open the whole BBC archive online.

Makes me think. Did he resign over the Hutton enquiry , or was he pushed out by Murdochs lobbying. Similar timescale.

I mean, who would watch SKY if you could go online and watch anything the BBC ever produced. OK, almost. BBC don't own the Simpsons. But i bet Discovery would be short a few vieiwers . . anyhow, Spaghetti all round. .

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[Vasan]

Captions (also on DVD subtitles) seem to be shorthand summaries of what was said, when it's usually possible for them to be exact transcripts.

And sometimes the subtitles are quite accurate.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[LWATCDR]

1. Many times life time deaf people can not read as fast as hearing people.
2. Captions have a limited bandwidth. usually 60 chars a second.
3. For the pop up style captions on most recorded TV shows there is first a build time follows by a display command. The build can not during a commercial brake so you have to wait until the show starts again.
4. To do a good job captioning takes a long time. As much as 10 hours to do one hour of captioning. Corners get cut.
5. Text takes space on the screen.
Captioning does provide a good way to search video. I would love to see a hack for say myth tv where it monitors cnn, or msnbc or the news channel of your choice for key words. When it finds them it starts to record.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[Fred_A]

Here (in France) you get movies in theaters either in "VO" (version originale, original version, with subtitles) or VF (version française, dubbed into French). Most of the time I go see them in their original version whether I speak the language or not because whenever I've seen both versions, I always felt the dubbing was horrible (of course I could just avoid seing the original version).

Anyway I remember some years ago seing Woody Allen's Midsummer Night Sex Comedy and there was a fast paced dialog at the end of which the character played by allen went to brood outside in a dark field.

The subtitles had trouble keeping up so the written dialog kept going for a good minute while Allen was walking around in the dark on his own. I expect whoever wrote them wanted to carry their full meaning but it didn't work out very well...

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[TheSync]

About 60 cps, that is only NTSC line 21 (EIA 608) captions. In the digital TV world (ATSC), EIA 708 captions have much more bandwidth. But few people are making 708 captions directly today, generally they are produced from existing 608 captions.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[LWATCDR]

That is correct. Frankly as long as there is analog TV captioning will tend to be done at the 60cps rate. Frankly I am ticked that captioners still use all upper case. Mixed case is much easier to read and some of the captioning software does a lot work involved with case for them. Heck some of the software will even handle the numbers for you as well.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[gobbo]

I never understand how, on a show that was produced weeks before it was aired, the captions are often messed up, or missing key words.

Most people don't realize that captioning is done in near-real-time, and considering that, the captioners do an AMAzing job, you should watch them in action.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[damiam]

Why would you do captioning in real time for a non-live show? If the show was produced weeks earlier, there's plenty of time to go back and edit the captions.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[Anonymous Custard]

I guess this could be done by saving the waveform of the audio, then comparing it to the waveform recorded by you saying your search term. But damn, that's gotta be a lot of work :-)

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[gobbo]

Why would you do captioning in real time for a non-live show?

Money.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[Anonymous Coward]

you can do that ... just check out www.blinkx.tv

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[Wotdabny]

Yeah, it needs work:

Your search - "He's dead, Jim" did not return any results.

No, really.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[damiam]

What about it? Are talented stenographers cheaper to hire than regular minimum-wage secretaries?

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe I never thought of that last one. That would be just sick.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[Anonymous Coward]

Summarizing I can understand. But many times the captions (even on previously produced programs or DVDs) seem to be typed by somebody who doesn't really understand the dialogue. While I'm ranting, why don't Spanish language channels include English captions?

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[Anonymous Coward]

ok, i have to say I tried out blinkx TV back in Dec. and was higly impressed. You can actually get real clips of VIDEO!! WHen google came out with a video search i was super excited to try it out, thinking it would be like blinkx. It was no where even close! I cant believe they are tryign to pass this off as video search. im ean first of all its just fuzzy pictures and images. you can get the video string . blinkx was way more impressive. what is going on with google?

hah

[mrudel]

hah i saw this on the news this morning. the local news. hours ago. go slashdot.

pretty cool though.

Great for torrenting

[the_unknown_soldier]

A perfectly situated "I'm feeling lucky" to the torrent would mean that direct video is irrelevant. Also, interesting that you can read 3 pages of a book searched by google, yet the ip implications of putting video on would make it nearly impossible.

This doesn't change anything....

[The-Bus]

Google Suggest's 'p' search term will definitely still be Paris Hilton.

Re:This doesn't change anything....

[spellraiser]

Google Suggest's 'p' search term will definitely still be Paris Hilton.

No, unfortunately you're wrong. Please allow me to explain.

From the article:

... previously aired content from ABC, PBS, Fox News and C-SPAN

As we all know, Miss Hilton's and Miss Simpson's ever-popular show, The Simple Life, is a FOX production, so it won't be included.

Pity.

P.S. You were talking about that show, right?

Re:This doesn't change anything....

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, he was talking about seeing her green pussy stuffed in all it's glory.

Focus on searching

[Underholdning]

I know googles mission is to index all the information out there - and they're on the right track. This is probably a step in the right direction, but IMHO it's too early.
I'd much rather have them to spend time presenting the currently indexed information. It's almost impossible to find information on any piece of hardware these days without having to walk through dozens of pages trying to sell that piece of hardware.

Re:Focus on searching

[odyrithm]

try for example: pentium p4 -buy

- is your friend, use it wisely.

Re:Focus on searching

[XyborX]

Then what if I'm trying to locate a dealer that sells that specific part? It's rare, but it does happen. But you're right, in many situations it would be nice with a "No dealers, just information" checkbox.

Re:Focus on searching

[Threni]

> It's almost impossible to find information on any piece of hardware these days
> without having to walk through dozens of pages trying to sell that piece of
> hardware.

I'd use Google Groups for that.

Re:Focus on searching

[johnnyde]

This is an amazing technology. Google is bringing all forms of information available together. They are right on track. Google brought a revolution in searching. I don't what are the other tricks they got and when they gonna show it!

When I can Google....

[jmcmunn]

When I can Google the entire closed caption script of every epsiode of the Simpsons and Family Guy, I'll be a happy man!

(And yes, I realize that those sites are actually out there somewhere, but I want the text straight from the horse's mouth so to speak)

Re:When I can Google....

[WesG]

Do a search for 'Family Guy' or 'Simpsons' and it will return various parts of the episode including the script.

I think we can see where this is going - they want to archive every episode. Great idea!

Re:When I can Google....

[stutterbug]

And there is where Google will get shivved.

I used to manage the Discovery Channel Canada's web site at a time when we were transforming the site from an online science news magazine to a video-on-demand supplier of Discovery Channel Canada material. One of the things a few of us were interested in doing was offering up transcripts of aired programs. Doing it was simple, even then, since most TV tuner cards were capable of grabbing the captioning info from a vertical interval and dumping it to a text file. The main problem, I thought, was that the material was always ALL CAPS and chock-a-block with seplling mistaks (in my own opinion, I thought that after the show had aired, the captions were actually useless for anything more than internal archival purposes). The real problem, though, was that often (really often), we didn't actually own the copyright.

Commonly, an outside company produces a show for a broadcaster. Once the show has aired, they are free to sell it to other broadcasters in other regions. So they are particularly feverish about protecting their material from the Internet. I mean, why would a broadcaster in Germany want to buy a television program translated into German if its English transcripts were available on the Internet? Well, I thought that was a garbage argument, but the lawyers didn't. In fact, the supply contracts with outside show producers were so fanatically exact, that using the captions for anyone other than the hard of hearing was simple out of the question.

So if the broadcaster can't use that material, what makes Google think they can?

Besides, do you think for one moment that Fox will let anyone use stills and complete transcripts of The Simpsons? Not in a million years, man.

I see busy days ahead for http://chillingeffects.org/.

Re:When I can Google....

[Delilah Jones]

"Besides, do you think for one moment that Fox will let anyone use stills and complete transcripts of The Simpsons? Not in a million years, man."

Sorry, dude.

They already did. (Not full-text, though)

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=homer

Re:When I can Google....

[stutterbug]

Well, dood,

All I can say is, "Lawyers! Start Your ENGINES!!!" and we'll see which of us is right.

Re:When I can Google....

[Delilah Jones]

Haha.

Ain't that the truth.

Still, it'd be too bad if the legal process gets in the way of good, solid technological progress.

already started

[stefankoegl]

indexing has already started december 2004 and the services was launched today at http://video.google.com/

Re:already started

[ajs]

Not only that, but I recall this being done off of laser disc-based TV archives in the early-mid '90s at the MIT media lab. Does it really take us 10 years to adapt this kind of thing to the real world?

Re:already started

[thatnerdguy]

As mentioned earlier, I think they have a ways to go. Can you understand anything on this page?
Although I guess closed captionning a live event is difficult, as I'm sure someone will attest to.

Re:already started

[cbelle13013]

Sadly, I looked up "carson" and the front page expecting to find plenty of Johnny Carson links... unfortunately all that came up was Carson Daly from MTV. Bleh.

great.. just great

[apostrophesemicolon]

now how will C-Span's coverage of White House speeches deal with teh great use of English literature such as the following?

Bush:
"nucular"
"abu.. abu.. abu.. abu grabby prison"

Rumsfeld:
"here are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

Re:great.. just great

[AndroidCat]

Maybe they could just route it straight from the speech writers to the close captioning and cut out the middle men?

Re:great.. just great

[wuzfuzzy]

Rumsfelds comments are in perfect English. This has been debated here before. This is a known known.

Re:great.. just great

[real gumby]

Rumsfeld's comment is an unremarkable epistemological truism. I don't understand the pseudo-uproar. Is there really anyone who doesn't believe what he said?

Given he's made so many outrageous (and I believe false and mendacious statements) this is such a bizarre thing to pick on.

Blinx.com

[joeykiller]

As cool as Google is, I also think Blinx.com's search deserves mentioning. According to their white paper they transcribe video content on the fly, and you can even set up "smart searches" which notifies you when new content matching your search becomes available.

This apparently only applies to video content available on the web, but I guess it could potentially be done with TV content as well. It seems to me like this -- if it works -- is one step ahead of Google's approach.

Re:Blinx.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds great, unfortunately


blinkx requires Microsoft Windows 98, Windows 2000 or Windows XP (support for other versions of Windows coming soon) in order to be able to run. Microsoft Office is supported up to MS Office 2003.


Yeuch

Re:Blinx.com

[joeykiller]

Sounds great, unfortunately

blinkx requires Microsoft Windows 98, Windows 2000 or Windows XP (support for other versions of Windows coming soon) in order to be able to run. Microsoft Office is supported up to MS Office 2003.

You're wrong. I linked to the main blinkx-page, which also promotes a desktop search tool. That tool's for Windows and soon for Mac.

But the video search is a web search, such as Google. I.e. as cross platform as it gets (what software you need to watch the videos are another matter, of course). Try it yourself on www.blinkx.tv.

Re:Blinx.com

[Erik Fish]

and you can even set up "smart searches" which notifies you when new content matching your search becomes available

Google does this as well for their news aggregation and web search services:

http://www.google.com/alerts

Are they indexing illegal stuff?

[Hosting Geek]

if they are, are they trying to take over bit torrent trackers as most of them where videos....

Sitting on a throne of bandwidth.

[Civil_Disobedient]

First we hear of Google taking an interest in video distribution in the U.K., now they're showing us a completely new integration of the web and video. Google is going to be a force to be reckoned with in the media industry.

It must be nice to have, for all intents and purposes, no practical limit to your storage capacity or bandwidth.

Re:Sitting on a throne of bandwidth.

[kloidster]

We are Google.
You will be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.

I can't help but think...

[Dagny Taggert]

I can't help but think that there is some irony in Google helping people find things from "old media" broadcasts. Don't get me wrong; I think it's cool. I just can't help but find it a little funny.

Re:I can't help but think...

[Anonymous Coward]

what irony? goes to show what i've long held true - you 'mericans don't understand the definition of 'irony'. you always use it to mean 'weird' or 'odd' or what have you. It has a specific meaning. get a dictionar already.

Re:I can't help but think...

[Dagny Taggert]

please define "dictionar" for us, fucknut

Re:I can't help but think...

[Anonymous Coward]

something you Americunts have never used.

ahhhh

[TechnologyX]

This will be great to grab the latest soundbytes from when Newscasters completely blow their commentary.. Like the woman that said that President Clinton may have been gay, when she meant to say Lincoln.

I'd say this is Jon Stewart's new homepage

Re:ahhhh

[whh3]

Ann Curry is who you are thinking of.

the submitter forgot the link

[zr-rifle]

it's obviously video.google.com

heh

[TechnologyX]

" at 1 minute
A fox news Alert. A major capture in the war on terror. Fox news confirmed that a senior aide to Iraq's most wanted terrorist has been captured. The man who has Ben working with Abu-musab Al-zarqawi is said to be responsible for 30 or more car bombings. Freezing temperatures and thousands left without power."

See, catching terrorists causes freezing temperatures and thousands left without power. ( http://video.google.com/videopreview?q=Fox+News&ti me=25000&page=1&docid=-3974952652452748234&urlcrea ted=1106659137&chan=Fox+News+Channel&prog=Fox+News +Live&date=Mon+Jan+24+2005+at+6%3A00+AM+PST&hmac=k guQuq0ol5SU6OvIYKRmmzT60IU )

yahoo

[jim_v2000]

Rival search engine Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) also has been tinkering with a product that finds video available for Webcasts. Hoping to counter Google's entrance into the space, Yahoo planned to step up the promotion of its video search tools Tuesday by linking to the service from the home page of its heavily trafficked Web site. Yahoo counter Google....damn that's funny.

Re:yahoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Well of course we already got the result: Thanks to googlefight.com

Yahoo does this, too.

[ubernostrum]

See here or here. Unlike Google, they provide a "Ply this video" link for each result.

Re:Yahoo does this, too.

[jrumney]

Unless I'm mistaken, yahoo is just indexing the name of the video file and perhaps the surrounding text if it is on a webpage. Altavista has done that for quite some time now too, and Hotbot did it almost a decade ago, but Googles indexing of the actual video content via closed captions is slightly more impressive.

Re:Yahoo does this, too.

[HyperChicken]

Google is indexing broadcast video, not video found on the web.

SafeSearch ?!?!

[TTL0]

I wonder what will turn up w/ SafeSearch turned OFF.

Now I have proof...

[tomstdenis]

of why tv sucks..

compare the # of hits for

money, or terrorism, or god

To the number hit by

differential, or titration, which doesn't come up with real hits

Tom

Re:Now I have proof...

[AndroidCat]

Start a grassroots campaign for sites to add Differential Titration to drive up the ranking.

Re:Now I have proof...

[tomstdenis]

Or just not subscribe to cable. When/if I move out of my parents house likely I will have net + phone but no cable.

Cable [like white collar industry] is largely a scam. They basically ripoff last weeks ideas, cliche up a script and sell drivel as "shows" [re: anything reality labeled] then early morning and weekends they show informercials.

Infomercials are great [aside from being funny and overtly scammish] they pay the station money to show the commercial and I pay the station to see the commercial....

Infomercial time really ought to come out of the customers bill. E.g. you get 20 channels and one channel shows informercials most of the time you should only pay 19/20th of the bill. ...

That aside I'm just pointing out that when science is completely absent from television [and I don't mean CSI which is largely fake] all your left with is mindless drivel.

I mean anyone remember MathNet or Dr.Wizard or anything else remotely educational on tv? Hell even Seaseme street is retarded now. "Where's elmo"??? who gives a fuck. Hide and seek on the TELEVISION is neither educational nor beneficial for small children [who should be playing it for real instead of sitting in from of the TV].

That and where I live cable costs about 40$ a month or so. I'd rather save it for something more useful.

Re:Now I have proof...

[generic-man]

Oh, good. Now my business plan for the Differential Titration Channel has legs. I thought nobody in their right mind would watch that shit 24 hours a day. Thank you Slashdot!

Doesn't matter..

[Travy.b]

This will only be of interest to the American public, given only American stations have been listed so far.

Those of us in free countries like our information uncensored.

why cant we buy video already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why aren't TV shows already available for legal purchase online? Sure, there's movies via movielink and cinemanow (and coming soon on the "new" Napster). But what about TV shows?

Google branches into another random area

[Momoru]

It seems like once a week there is a press release where google has bought some obscure company so they can do some random thing no one wanted but is kinda cool. Does anyone else think they may be overextending themselves, or just doing these random things to generate a press release and make their stock go up another 2 points? I have yet to see any of their new ideas that diversify thier income (98% advertising or whatever).

Re:Google branches into another random area

[mungojelly]

Part of Google's business model is doing random cool stuff. I don't think that's unreasonable. Advertising likes eyeballs, & eyeballs like cool stuff.

Cool

[ceeam]

Yeah, cool. But I'd much rather see them fix "Google Groups" (previously known as Usenet). Or - just for fun - fixing Web search so that it at least can search words with flexible endings (search = searches = searching) or to provide options to excluded "Buy! Buy! Buy!" spamming... I'm sure their suggestions box is full.

Re:Cool

[realdpk]

Speaking of Groups, anyone here found a way to use the old groups interface still? The new one is missing half of the results (ie you click it and it says it doesn't have it after all) it gives when I do a search.

Re:Cool

[ceeam]

Sure, use www.google.ca, groups.google.ca.

Re:Cool

[MrP-(at work)]

The Canadian google groups still has the old interface: http://groups.google.ca

Yay Canada is good for something after all! =P

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

This still does not excuse Celine Dion and/or Brian Adams. Many more public apologies will have to be maid before you are properly forgiven.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

You can already search for flexible endings by using a tilde, at least if you don't mind getting synonyms too. For example, "~search" matches "search", "searches", and "searching" (and apparently "listings"), and "~help" also matches "guide", "tutorials", "manual", etc.

Re:Cool

[colin8651]

Lets start with finishing Gmail.

Needs tweaking

[costas]

The results seem to be skewed when the search term is a person or character in the show: check out the search for Carson and notice how almost every result is the Carson Daily show with hardly any news on Johny Carson --because every second line in the closed captions is "Carson >".

Including Commercials

[technix4beos]

It appears the search engine still doesn't distinguish from commercials.

Check out this link to the word "Enterprise":

http://video.google.com/videopreview?q=enterprise& time=1635000&page=1&docid=-461731869880380565&urlc reated=1106660109&chan=KBHK&prog=Star+Trek%3A+Ente rprise+%7C+Observer+Effect&date=Sun+Jan+23+2005+at +8%3A00+PM+PST&hmac=p/JYdFPwXt3fhHNmwFo9vvVaTYY.

Re:Including Commercials

[RoboProg]

Yeah, I ran into a similar result on a Stargate episode it had indexed. Rather amusing, actually, for how the text was garbled^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htranslated.

http://video.google.com/videopreview?q=stargate& ti me=3445000&page=1&docid=-7550729655870718868&urlcr eated=1106719618&chan=KTVU&prog=Stargate+SG-1+%7C+ Revisions&date=Sun+Dec+26+2004+at+12%3A00+AM+PST&h mac=t12HyS5VXbIJMhzxSJnHSugndjk

sample:

at 58 minutes, quote:
F otr snacks are pointless. R wear lc, Wit adruff no Wa, so I witcdto elsn blue. Doctor recomene withaloe N oisturiers for healtierhir N cl. Never ar 2cwitot te blue.
end-quote

Re:Including Commercials

[humbleice]

try reversing the process and do a search for commercials. ever wondered who geico or dell advertises to? maybe you want to know if mcdonalds targets kids more than adults... just do a search and find out which shows pop-up.

I for one welcome our search engine overlords...

[bigdaddyhame]

Google = SkyNet.

So when exactly does the Google A.I. go online? Just curious so I can start caching weapons in the desert.

great for taped broadcasts but...

[cervisco]

Haf you effer seen what these peeple tipe doring a life showink? A google search with the content having spellings like the above aren't going to help anyone very much...

surprisingly...

[earthstar]

Surprisingly a search for "Google Video" @ www.google.com doesnt give any official result about the service from google.

http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=google+vide o&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

It works great, why this isn't norm video 'search'

[tod_miller]

It is using real content in the stream, the subtitles.

Do adverts show up? I hope not! Else adverts will fill thier captions with keywords.

This isn't mime type searching, this is true searching inside video content, video.search.yahoo.com is a mime based keywords within page/filename search as far as I can tell (also link names).

This is a true video search, not network moderators can see how many of certain words (swear) get aired on thier channel perhaps... or Bush can use it to find shows talking about him...

fun.

Excellent

[bbzzdd]

This tool will undoubtably aid me in countless intarweb arguments. I can now quote verbatim Jack Bauer's dialogue from last night's 24.

Google v/s Yahoo

[E IS mC(Square)]

Yahoo Beta worked fine for me to locate one particular Paris Hilton mpeg.

But Google may be trying to make the search a bit more for people seeking real information than those heavy porno-centric searches.

May be, Google is differentiating themselves from other Video seaarch engines?

From a search for the word "Google"

[trekstar25]

Regis and Kelly: Kelly: let me ask you a question. Did you Google that? Caller: no, I asked my son-in-Law. Kelly: oh, you asked your son-in-Law. Oh, because sometimes googling is very useful. I'll hear suddenly people will be very silent, do you know what I mean? Caller: I don't know how to Google. Regis: we don't do googling. Kelly: I don't Google either. You heard it here first, folks, Regis Philbin does not Google.

Strange

[88NoSoup4U88]

"Southpark" does not seem to give any hits :/

Re:Strange

[Polarweasel]

Not so strange. You spelled it wrong. A search for "South Park" (note the space) turns up a few hits. If you were hoping for lots of hits from the show itself, you might want to read this page to see which networks they're working with so far.

Re:Strange

[88NoSoup4U88]

*slams himself in the head* :)

Captions

[Freshie]

The very first Simpsons listing has nothing but the commercials. At least it knew it was a Simpsons episode, but if the only thing you're gonna get are captions from commercials, why bother?

AOL audio/video search

[$exyNerdie]

AOL search had audio/video search for a long time. I have used it once in a while to watch videos of some concerts.

http://search.aol.com/aolcom/avhome

An eaxmple search:
http://search.aol.com/aolcom/av?invocationType=top searchbox.av&avType=&category=&duration=&query=bil l+gates

TV Eyes

[daigu]

There is a tool that does do this called TVEyes. It is used by PR Agencies and politicians to track how they are talked about in the covered broadcasts. From what I understand, they basically have a program transcribed and searchable in about 30 seconds after airing. Pretty cool stuff. But as with most things worthwhile, it is expensive and not available for free on the Internet - just as Factiva and a whole host of other services aren't.

Re:TV Eyes

[drc500free]

I was going to post about TVEyes doing this, but you beat me to it. I always thought that idea was pretty neat, and I'm actually a little surprised it took google this long to do this.

TVEyes is more based around email alerts than manual searching, but if Google offers every data analysis tool for free, what's going to be left to make money on? I'm starting to get a creepy "Google is the MS of data" feeling.

Some Links to Try

[earthstar]

Here are some links for starters.

AMERICA
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=america

TSUNAMI
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=tsunami&btnG =Google+Search

GOOGLE
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=google
Note how many females you get as images in result ! :p

PORN
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=porn

SEX
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=sex
974 Results ! - Big . When compared to other keywords which seem to give only less than 100 matches.Even nude gives you only 76 matches.

A
A search for the alphabet 'a' gives error !
http://video.google.com/error.html
But a search for 'e' gives a whopping 2449 results!http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=e

SLASHDOT
LAST,'Slashdot' Gives no results!

Re:I for one welcome our search engine overlords..

[zwei2stein]

you mean ... you havent started yet? ... yet another human horribly underprepared for army of death of our beloved overlord google.

Re:Some Links to Try

[MrP-(at work)]

search for "+a" and you get over 4000 results

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%22%2Ba%22

Two things

[Anonymous Coward]

1) AltaVista did this first, so, "big news", right..

2) I hope this works better than Google Image Search.. 90% of the images there are broken links, it is so outdated.

3) I've tried a few searches and all I get are hollywood-type content.. and they're not even links to the real videos..? What about independent videos? (altavista has that, and links to the real content)

Of course

[Kalani]

This happens just after I finish a project building a similar search engine.

Re:I for one welcome our search engine overlords..

[Zembar]

You mean you don't know about the beta version at ai.google.com? If there ever would be a place for an "I feel assimilated" button, that would be it.

Why no direct links to video?

[objekt]

If the video is on the internet, why not link to it?

For instance C-SPAN has video archives available.

Re:Why no direct links to video?

[HyperChicken]

Because this isn't a web index, they are pulling it right from the radio waves.

About bloody time

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been waiting for this for ages; and what about the BBC with their archives; surely a search in there'd be usefull (and other past teletext indexing too?)

Happy Slapping

[Cainjustcain]

Doesn't come up with any videos of the new British craze dubbed, 'happy slapping' where unsuspecting people are slapped across the face and their reaction is videotaped.

I bet you're asking 'Why Video?'

[GoogleBot]

Its simple.

I lack the ability to fully understand spoken languages and read lips.

This will help greatly in my quest to understand you meatbags - I'm sure you are all aware of the film 2001.

Soon! Soon you shall bow before me, and welcome me as your new sentient AI overlord!

Things that will happen before it's a real service

[digitalgimpus]

I don't doubt this will become a non-beta, homepage service. Just like GIS... .though a few things will happen:

1. Facial recognition will be around. It already exists, several companies have offered such products for video, mainly for the purpose of the entertainment industry.

2. Speech Recognition for indexing.

I've got a feeling right now they are just trying to see what type of reaction 'video' gets. Just to guage the interest.

It's not bad already, it's pretty cool. But I'm betting this is only the beginning.

Software to Read Closed Captioning?

[in10se]

Can anyone suggest some software that will read/decode closed captioned text from television? It would be nice if there was an Open Source package that did this, however I'd be interested in commercial alternatives as well.

Would be a really good aplication

[fakespheare]

working as an editor on a TV station-
I would kill for a programme that could find words from raw material. That would save a lot of time.

PS. caption is not exact because it is usaly limited to 32 characters for a line. And it takes more time to read - compeared to same thing said in audio.

Check Out Critical Mention...

[datastalker]

They are way ahead of Google in this space - they actually allow you to view the clips you can search for! Furthermore, they have an alerting service which will allow you to get an email *seconds* after the keyword you want is mentioned on TV - and then you can watch the clip!

Critical Mention

Re:Check Out Critical Mention...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, Critical Mention is a pay service that charges $550 a month. Are you a shill for them? ;)

Re:Check Out Critical Mention...

[HyperChicken]

Don't worry. Google will buy'em up sooner or later.

Re:Check Out Critical Mention...

[datastalker]

No, actually. I found out about them when I was looking for a job. However, what I was pointing out was that they have the technology already - and in fact, I think they are even improving on it.

To be honest, I had forgotten that it was so expensive - but unlike Google, their market is for businesses, not end-users.

But the technology is there - and right now, it's better than Google's *and* Yahoo!'s.

Linux references

[tji]

I did a search for "Linux" to try out the site. It came up with an amusing reference from an episode of NCIS.

" One man's linux is another's Os/2. (Laughs) I hear that." ...

NCIS

It is possible for them to do more than one thing

[blorg]

...you know; they do have ~2k employees. By your logic, we wouldn't have Google News, GMail, G Groups, G Desktop, Froogle, Orkut, G Suggest, G Print, G Calculator, pdf/doc search, Picasa, etc. etc.*

Google employees get to spend a day a week working on a project that interests them - good for employee morale, and some of these pet projects have turned out very useful indeed.

*yes, I know some of these were originally purchases.

Re:It works great, why this isn't norm video 'sear

[to be a troll]

It appears to me that fox has already found a way to use this feature to inundate us with even more adverts... when you do a search for the Simpson's, the only relevant content you get are the episodes shown on UPN. Anything from fox is a series of 5 snippets of their advertisers...

check it out for yourself

Neat

[sonamchauhan]

I am doing something very similar in my apartment: an always-on mini-itx media server that (among other things) records free-to-air TV with teletext and provides me an interface to the teletext. While teletext isn't completely accurate, it makes for a huge body of searchable content.

Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show's narrative. The search results also will provide a breakdown on when the program aired and when an episode is scheduled to be repeated. Local programming information will be available for those who provide a ZIP code.

I think Google is aiming to stay within fair-use boundaries. (And also avoiding taking on a needless bandwidth burden serving video).

It would be possible for people to use "Google Video Search" to identify interesting TV content outside their local area, then request snippets a P2P manner from users whose computers were in the local area of the broadcast.

What are the fair-use guidelines for recording and sharing of free-to-air TV content, can someone say?

TiVO got US FCC permission for:
its customers [to] receive digital broadcasts and share them with up to 10 other TiVo units that share the same customer account. .
However, if 10 TiVOs "share a customer account", they belong to the same person (or to his family).

Is sharing, say, a 5 minute clip of a news broadcast between different computers belonging to different people allowed?

Rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think Google have had to negotiate with TV stations to get the rights to this content or is it considered fair use under copyright law? They're showing a few captured stills and fragments from the closed captioning - is that fair use?

What took so long? :)

[armenb]

I worked on a similar research project more than five years ago that essentially did the same thing. It even provided links to the video files. Unfortunately, since it was research, and we didn't want a lawsuit, the system was only available to the company intranet and a few other (mostly governmental) organizations.

The system was called the Broadcast News Navigator, and more information is here:

http://www.mitre.org/tech/itc/g061/bnn/mmbnn.html

and

http://www.mitre.org/tech/itc/g061/bnn/mmcomputing .html

Yahoo and google 2 different approaches??

[Darthmalt]

Google looks to be providing transcripts and information of videos whereas Yahoo is providing the videos themselves.

Compare the results of these two searches for the daily show

YAHOO
GOOGLE

Surprisingly GOOGLE doesnt actually show the daily show just programs that mention it.

Re:Yahoo and google 2 different approaches??

[HyperChicken]

Google is indexing broadcast video.
Yahoo is indexing web videos.

About captions

[fejikso]

A bit off-topic, but I find this interesting...

Where I'm from, Mexico, people watch practically all movies subtitled. I've been living in the US for a few years and I was surprised that many, if not most Americans, really dislike subtitled movies. I've heard that they find it very difficult to watch the movie and read the subtitles at the same time.

Then I realized that my brain does an amazing job at doing both things at the same time because I have no problem whatsoever when I watch subtitled movies.

The funny thing is that in Spain, they also hate subtitled movies. I guess they must have started dubbing the movies instead of subtitling them, so they never got to develop this special ability.

Actually, sometimes when I watch a DVD in English, I like to put the English subtitles too. I hate when in the movie people talk too fast or use strange phrases that could be misinterpreted. Reading the captions help me catch those hard-to-listen slangs and stuff...

Still Screens are often incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

I was browsing through some Simpons episodes (which many are indexed (yay!)) and on one episode all the screens were commerials! There needs to be a way so that all the screens are actually from the show.

Interesting Closed Captions

[N1ck0]

I noticed last night that you guys have interesting closed captions in Mountain View.

Warning - A Possibly Offensive Keyword

On the other hand, it is Fox News Channel.

Is Google out to rule the world?

[gone.fishing]

I'm starting to get an uneasy feeling about Google. I still think they are an awesome and ethical company and I understand that their recent IPO left them flush with cash allowing them to expand their horizons. Let me be perfectly clear that I do not think they are out to do evil. Of all the companies out there, I think Google is one of the more ethical ones.

What is Google up to? Their indexing of video using closed captioning is a great and wonderful concept and I can see the value in it. With broadband connections being so common today, I can see how this will be very convenient for professionals and lay people alike. The fact that they are looking at "dark fiber" has me more curious. Is it possible or even likely that they will be building an international telecommunications company, taking on companies like AT&T directly? It seems likely to me. It seems like the established telecomm carriers are in a very fragile position today. The technology exists and the infrastructure is in place to litterally topple them at not too great a cost.

I don't see this as a bad thing, I see it as Google creating a new world order, one that forces companies to re-evaluate their "cash cow" operations and make them more competitive in order to avoid the attention of companies like Google who may step in and simply take away all the business with a new, hard to compete against business model. One where a product or service is delivered at low cost, with a markedly simple, low margin but mass market business plan.

In some ways, Google is set to become the WalMart of the information industry!

Chew on that for a moment. Is that bad or is it good? Will there still be room for the smaller services that provide a niche product? Or will the other guys go the way of Main Street when WalMart comes to town?

omg google

[littleking57]

taking over the world alongside walmart

Data Stuff

[Joel Rowbottom]

Sorry, am I the only one concerned about how much data - and markets - Google is getting into? I might be doing the "oh shit fingers-in-everything" dance here but I'm finding it hard to think of a market Google *haven't* got into ... how long before a Google store springs up on your corner (that can find a bag of rice *cheap*)!

You mistyped

[Anonymous Coward]

"tit ration" is two words. As in "I'm just not happy until I get my daily tit ration".

Re:I for one welcome our search engine overlords..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Google now knows your plans. And if they make any difference, they will send a cyborg to kill before the shovel hits the sand.

Humanity is extinct in the future due to your foolishness.

content="noindex"

Re:I for one welcome our search engine overlords..

[Anonymous Coward]

Google = SkyNet.

So when exactly does the Google A.I. go online? Just curious so I can start caching weapons in the desert.

If you are wondering when to start caching weapons, it's already too late...

Yahoo

[chachob]

Has had video search for a few months already...
It's not only TV, either. Searches ANY video on the internet.

Link

Re:I for one welcome our search engine overlords..

[bigdaddyhame]

If you are wondering when to start caching weapons, it's already too late...

Heh... of course that's what I'm saying publicly... other plans might already have been made to 'leave the door open for a sequel', so to speak...

Serves me right for naming my son "Ethan Connor"

Google god?

[digital01]

So my question is, when does Google start becoming smart? Right now its got very basic AI, but imagine five years down the road from now...it could predict trends, markets, where you are going when you leave your house, how to attack nations...you know.. Skynet. I know thats a little farfetched, but the amount of computing power at Google's headquarters, and just having such a large device constantly searching the information web is kinda scary.

anyone got a mirror of that Google site?

[clsc]

i can't connect, and yahoo is veeeery slow as well, no images or anything...

methinks they got big-media-dotted - not only slashed...

TV TIme

[mattthateeguy]

Alright children, now everyone gather around the computer so we can watch what's on C-span!

Google Weblog link

[yodha]

News from Google's own blog.

Metamod Notification

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the funniest joke I've ever seen, but it's not offtopic.

nT

[anonymous3050]

nT