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Google Moves Into Video

Posted by Hemos on from the finally-tipping-their-hand dept.

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.

6 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Not as good as it sounds by ironfrost · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Not as good as it sounds by dschuetz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. Blinx.com by joeykiller · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Needs tweaking by costas · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 >".

  4. It is possible for them to do more than one thing by blorg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...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.

  5. Yahoo and google 2 different approaches?? by Darthmalt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.